I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope of happiness beyond this life. I believe in equality of man, and I believe their religious duties consists of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy. My own mind is my own church. Thomas Paine
From feedproxy.google
New numbers from DirecTV and Dish show that the satellite TV business may now be at its peak and will enter a decline as consumers turn to their iPads, laptops and mobile devices to watch video on the web rather than on TV. In DirecTV’s Q4 earnings, the company reported an increase in total subscribers but a bad miss on new subscribers, which are down 56.7 percent. When asked when DirecTV’s subscribers might go into an absolute decline, analyst Vijay Jayant who covers cable and satellite TV for ISI Group told BI: “It might go negative in 2Q this year and reverse. I think 2015 is when I have them negative for the full year.” Dish will report Q4 numbers tomorrow morning. ISI is expecting a net loss of subscribers for the full year. Here’s a summary of the negative trending subscriber numbers for both companies, based on company disclosures and ISI estimates: DirecTV: Dish: As you can see from this ISI chart, Dish has probably already entered its death throes: Note that the numbers all dovetail with Time Warner’s loss of subscribers from its cable business and an overall expected decline in the number of people expected to pay for television in 2012,
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From feedproxy.google
Jeff Simmermon, the director of digital communication for Time Warner Cable, gave us a blast from the past on Twitter today: He linked to a 1981 report from The New York Times on the state of cable, a story written when broadcast TV bestrode the earth like an invincible colossus and America was still being introduced to the idea that you didn’t need rabbit ears to watch Monday Night Football. The story is a gem, in hindsight. It begins: MAJOR advertisers and agencies are slowly beginning to test cable television as an advertising medium. How fast the medium grows will depend on how quickly cable operators and advertisers develop the new technology’s place in the advertising spectrum. It also remains to be seen what other advertising media will be hurt by cable’s growth. Because of the basic similarity, one might expect that commercial broadcast television would be the most likely to suffer. But Roger Rice, president of the Television Bureau of Advertising, said he is not worried. History is about to turn full circle on Time Warner. The company lost 129,000 subscribers last quarter; many of those losses came because people are cutting the cord and watching video online. Now who’s not worried? Here’s the Times story (below):
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From feedproxy.google
“I’m here to snake your drain.” “I’m here to flush your pipe.” These are the one-liners in Liquid-Plumr’s new campaign for its Double Impact pipe de-clogging product. The only thing missing from this trip through every porn movie cliche the company could think of seems to be the joke about laying some pipe. DDB San Francisco ought to be ashamed of itself. But the ad agency can claim one saving grace: It chose Clay Weiner to direct the spot. Yes, that’s a real person. Without further comment:
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From feedproxy.google
The Northeastern U.S.—New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington—is thick with two things: museums and public transport hubs. Both environments have oversized staircases. UpStares Media of Livingston, N.J., has taken advantage of this architectural quirk by specializing in staircase advertising since 2004. Its patented adStep product utilizes the riser above each step in a staircase. When viewed from a distance, the strips combine to form a complete picture, often in the form of a visual pun. Kaiser Permanente, for instance, did a disorienting staircase ad that appeared to show footprints on a sandy beach leading to blue waves at the top of the flight. Nationwide Insurance turned a staircase in Las Vegas into a steep roadway with an out-of-control car barreling down on climbing pedestrians. The tagline: “Life comes at you fast.” Please follow Advertising on Twitter and Facebook. See Also:
Body Worlds at the Franklin Institute Philadelphia
Dali exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
From feedproxy.google
A London bus stop ad utilizing facial recognition technology will only display its ads to women and girls so that men will get an idea of what it’s like to be second-class citizens. The “Because I Am A Girl” campaign for Plan UK supports education for girls in developing countries. Its CEO told The Independent: “We’re not giving men and boys the choice to see the full ad on this occasion – so they get a glimpse of what it’s like to have basic choices taken away,” said Marie Staunton, Plan UK’s chief executive. The ad, a 40-second interactive video, is a stunt—there is only one installation somewhere on Oxford Street, a busy shopping district—but it promises the dawn of Minority Report-style targeted advertising outdoors. (In the movie, Tom, Cruise’s character is famously assailed by outdoor ads that call him by name.) Plan UK claims the technology is 90 percent accurate at discerning women from men. When men approach the display, they will see only a URL. Outdoor ad provider Clear Channel writes: “Our new screen is the most advanced screen yet to be used in out-of-home advertising,” said Neil Chapman, group head of the Create team at Clear Channel UK. “Incorporating sophisticated multi-touch, a wide-angle HD camera and 3D depth sensor, it’s like a giant iPad crossed with an XBox Kinect. Using the screen, brands can encourage consumers to view, browse, create, share and download HD content, connect to social media, interact via the touch screen or gesture, and even star in the ads using augmented reality. Good advertising can raise awareness of social issues and Plan’s campaign does this well.” A privacy activist with the Open Rights Group called the ad “creepy.” You can see images of the bus stop here.
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From carectomy.com
At Carectomy, we’ve spent significant ink (err… pixels) lambasting the “solution†that biofuels provide. Now, as the NY Times reports, consumers are getting fed up with the ethanol mixed in with their gas to boot. It’s not an awakening of conscience; they just don’t think the stuff works. From the NY Times: Many consumers complain that ethanol, [...] Related posts:
From carectomy.com
Dan Cooley of Louisville, KY lost fifteen pounds in four months – and saved cash and a bit of the environment along the way. Cooley, like many, was fed up with rising gas prices and temperatures and turned to bicycle commuting. But on the morning July 25th, Cooley fell victim to a malicious act of road [...] Related posts:
From news.consumerreports
The attempts of LightSquared to build a national wireless broadband Internet service may be drawing to an end. Federal regulators’ tests have shown the proposed LightSquared service interferes with the space-based GPS navigation signals which the military, commercial interests, and…
From news.consumerreports
The attempts of LightSquared to build a national wireless broadband Internet service may be drawing to an end. Federal regulators’ tests have shown the proposed LightSquared service interferes with the space-based GPS navigation signals which the military, commercial interests, and…
From dpreview.com
Just two weeks ago Kodak announced a range of new / improved CCD’s. Today the NY Times (online) is carrying a story of a new prototype camera from Foveon which also sports a 16 megapixel imager, this time a CMOS device at a considerably lower price (according to them) than the Kodak device. They say “…able to capture digital images with a resolution of 4,096 by 4,096 picture elements – or pixels – per square inch. That, by some measures, is about twice the resolution of 35-millimeter film.”
Low-Price, Highly Ambitious Digital Chip
Suddenly the future of digital photography seems to be becoming much clearer.
Only two weeks ago, Eastman Kodak announced a chip able to capture digital images with a resolution of 4,096 by 4,096 picture elements — or pixels — per square inch. That, by some measures, is about twice the resolution of 35-millimeter film.
Today, a company founded by one of Silicon Valley’s pioneer chip designers, will announce an image-sensing chip capable of the same resolution as the Kodak chip, but made using a technique that could be much less expensive.
Executives of the company, Foveon, said they had given a prototype camera based on their chip to a photographer in Los Angeles, Greg Gorman, who had used it to make a portrait of a cowboy. In that image, no pixels, or dots, were visible to the eye, even with the photograph blown up to a size of 8 feet by 4 feet.
Already, digital cameras being sold on the consumer market for less than $1,000 are rivaling 35-millimeter film cameras. Digital images of the clarity achieved with Foveon chip could begin to challenge even the much more expensive 4-by-5 film cameras made by companies like Hasselblad that are used by professional photographers for portraiture, advertising and fashion.
“We’re headed to flat-out replace the film camera,” said Carver Mead, the founder of Foveon, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif. Mr. Mead, a pioneer of the chip industry, became a Silicon Valley legend in the 1970′s by helping develop techniques that for the first time enabled chip engineers to create circuits containing tens of thousands of transistors.
Industry analysts say that the new technologies could affect much more than still cameras. High-resolution images, if produced in quantities that made the new generation of image-sensing chips cost only several dollars apiece, could become a staple of cellular telephones and other hand- held devices and might bring the cost of a consumer video camera below $100.
And the contest is not only between film and digital sensors, but between two kinds of chip-making techniques. Foveon’s planned announcement, coming on the heels of Kodak’s, suggests a sharpening battle between the two competing manufacturing technologies at the heart of a billion- dollar market for digital photographic sensors.
The Foveon chip is based on a low- cost semiconductor industry technology known as Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor, or CMOS (pronounced SEE-moss). The Kodak chip’s sensor is based on a more expensive manufacturing technology known as Charged Coupled Device, or C.C.D. imaging.
C.C.D.’s now dominate the digital- imaging industry, but compared with CMOS devices, they require production and assembly of several chips and related components to combine the sensing and computing tasks that can be performed by a single CMOS chip.
Both companies’ achievements have startled industry experts because the new devices move far beyond the current industry standards for CMOS and for C.C.D. cameras, which until now have been able to achieve resolutions of 6 million pixels a square inch. The Foveon and Kodak sensors can pack 16.8 million pixels into a square inch.
“If you asked someone if this was achievable in either technology two weeks ago, they would have said it was impossible,” said Michael Berger, an industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a market research firm in San Antonio.
The Foveon announcement is seen as a personal triumph for Mr. Mead, 66, who is regarded by many executives and engineers as the father of the modern semiconductor industry.
“Carver has tapped into something enormous,” said Alexis Gerard, president of Future Image Inc., a digital-imaging research and consulting firm in San Mateo, Calif. “When digital imaging and the telecommunications infrastructure converge, they will enable a shift from a text-based communication model to an image-based model.”
Throughout his career Mr. Mead has explored the idea of duplicating the human senses, including vision and hearing, by using silicon-based chip technologies. Several years ago, his earlier work led to the development of a smaller and more effective hearing aid now sold by Sonic Innovations of Salt Lake City.
Complex chips first became feasible in the 1970′s after Mr. Mead, at the time a professor at the California Institute of Technology, teamed up with a Xerox computer scientist named Lynn Conway to invent a technique for placing thousands of transistors on a chip — a technique known as Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit, or VLSI design.
Today, CMOS-based manufacturing — which is used to carry out VLSI design — is employed by virtually all microprocessor and memory makers. As a result, it has become extremely cost-efficient and can yield circuitry with more transistors and lower power requirements than most competing technologies.
Yet despite their promise, CMOS- based sensors have until now had just a tiny impact on the overall market for digital imaging because they have been unable to achieve the resolution and clarity of C.C.D. sensors. The global market in 1999 for C.C.D. sensors was $959 million, compared with only $14.2 million for CMOS sensors, according to Frost & Sullivan.
But even before Foveon’s latest achievement, CMOS was gaining ground. Not only have companies including Kodak and Polaroid begun to offer inexpensive, low-resolution CMOS-based cameras, but telecommunications giants like Nokia of Finland and NTT DoCoMo of Japan are planning to include inexpensive CMOS sensors in millions of their next-generation cellular phones.
Foveon’s contribution has been to improve the quality of CMOS images by continuing to put more computer processing power behind the task of capturing the digital image. The new 16.8 million pixel device has seven active transistors for each pixel. The benefits include less interference, better focusing and more precise exposure times. “When the pixels get smarter,” Mr. Mead said, “that translates into better image quality.”
Foveon’s principal investor and the company’s technology partner is National Semiconductor, a big Silicon Valley chip maker.
National Semiconductor’s manufacturing plant in Santa Clara is capable of etching chip circuitry only 0.18 micron wide — a microscopic fineness that few other chip makers can equal. By contrast, most current low-cost CMOS sensors are made with circuitry of 0.35 or 0.5 microns, which allows for millions fewer transistors per chip.
National Semiconductor executives said the company was planning to take the technology that Foveon had developed for the priciest reaches of the professional photography market and make it economical enough for some new consumer electronics.
“National’s interest is not in thousands of cameras a year but in hundreds of millions of cameras a year,” said Brian L. Halla, the company’s president and chief executive. “We could make the world’s highest-resolution throwaway digital camera and sell it for the price of a similar Kodak system.”
Foveon officials said they would demonstrate the new 16.8 million pixel sensor for the first time today. The sensor, which for now captures images in black and white, has almost 70 million transistors — or about two and a half times the number of transistors used by a Pentium III microprocessor chip for computers. Foveon says it expects the new sensor to be on the market within a year.
Currently, Foveon sells a high-end camera using an earlier version of its sensor that has a resolution of 2048 x 2048 pixels, or 4.19 million in all. That camera uses three separate sensors and a prism array to separate color information. But Mr. Halla said the company was also working on a technique that would permit a single chip to capture precise color information.
Despite the advances now being made, Mr. Mead acknowledged that digital-image sensors are still a long way from matching the skills of the human eye.
An eye is movable, which enables it to scan various parts of an image and then allow the brain to compose a single, larger image. The eye is also remarkably diverse: elements that have high resolution are clustered at the center of the field of vision, while sensing elements that function well at low light levels are around the periphery of the eye, giving human vision a great flexibility of range in varying light conditions that no artificial imaging system can yet match.
Mr. Mead said that because of fundamental size limits in the wavelengths of light, it is unlikely that future digital sensors will gain much additional resolution. Instead, shrinking semiconductor circuit sizes will make it possible for companies like Foveon to add more and more intelligence to their digital-imaging systems, perhaps simulating more of the image-enhancement functions of the human brain.
From dpreview.com
Some sneak news here from NY Times, IBM are readying their next generation MicroDrive, weighing in at 1GB yet still the same small CF Type II package, increased shock resistance (now a claimed 1500G) it will be priced at US$ 499 ($0.48/MB) and said to go on sale in September. “The smaller size and accelerating density of magnetic storage systems are one of the remarkable stories of Silicon Valley. Disk storage is now increasing at a rate faster than the legendary Moore’s Law improvement rate of the semiconductor industry. “
A portion of the NY Times article (registration required):
I.B.M. Device Raises Storage of Tiny PC’s
Plunging deeply into the world of pocket-sized personal computing, I.B.M. will introduce today a version of its tiny Microdrive hard drive with a storage capacity of a billion bytes of information.
The new drive, which is the size of a book of matches, is a milestone in the evolution of magnetic storage, I.B.M. executives said, because it surpasses the same one-gigabyte barrier the company’s original refrigerator-sized 3380 hard drive surmounted in the 1980′s.
The smaller size and accelerating density of magnetic storage systems are one of the remarkable stories of Silicon Valley. Disk storage is now increasing at a rate faster than the legendary Moore’s Law improvement rate of the semiconductor industry.
Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a silicon chip doubles roughly every 18 months.
When the first 340-megabyte Microdrive was introduced a year ago, it had a storage density of 5.04 billion bits a square inch. The current drive, which will ship commercially in September, has increased that density to 15.2 billion bits a square inch. The higher density means the tiny new drive is within 10 percent of the most advanced I.B.M. storage products now on the market, said John Osterhout, the marketing director for I.B.M.’s storage business.
The company said that it expected about one-third of the market for the new drives to be as storage devices for digital cameras. A one-gigabyte drive, which fits in the same storage slot as a flash memory card, could hold up to 1,000 high-resolution photographs, a thousand 200-page novels, or nearly 10 hours of high-quality digital audio music, the company said.
The company said that another third of the market would come as backup and data-transfer media for notebook and desktop computers. But in the future the company is most interested in an array of new markets based on hand-held computing devices like personal digital assistants and advanced digital cellular phones.
Phil says: Great news for price/MB of storage, not sure I’d like to put 1GB of images in one basket for too long…
From luxist.com
Filed under: Jewelry LVMH is proving to be an unstoppable luxury juggernaut with over 60 of the world’s most prestigious brands in tow including the ones in its name as well as Christian Dior, Fendi and Céline. Other luxury mega-groups include PPR and Richemont. The 127-year-old Bulgari brand is one of the most prestigious names in the jewelry and watches arena and is particularly popular in European and Asian markets. The brand also has several luxury hotels.
Recently we’ve been so busy watching the drama as luxury mega-conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton makes moves on French luxury brand Hermes that we didn’t even see them sneaking up on Bulgari. The NY Times reports that LVMH is set to announce on Monday that it is taking control of the luxurious Italian jeweler. According to the NY Times DealBook, Bulgari’s founding family is exchange its 51 percent stake in the jeweler to LVMH for stock in LVMH and it will also have seats on LVMH’s board. With those shares in place, it’s said that LVMH is planning to make offers to acquire the rest of the shares.
LVMH To Buy Up Bulgari originally appeared on Luxist on Sun, 06 Mar 2011 22:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Advertising From MotorcycleAccidentAttorneysOrangeCounty.com
A News Blog about Motorcycle Accident Attorneys Orange County. Personal injury is a legal term for an injury to the body, mind or emotions, as opposed to an injury to property. The term is most commonly used to refer to a type of tort lawsuit alleging that the plaintiff’s injury has been caused by the negligence of another, but also arises in defamation torts. The most common types of personal injury claims are road traffic accidents, accidents at work, tripping accidents, assault claims, accidents in the home, product defect accidents (product liability) and holiday accidents. The term personal injury also incorporates medical and dental accidents (which lead to numerous medical negligence claims every year) and conditions that are often classified as industrial disease cases, including asbestosis and peritoneal mesothelioma, chest diseases (e.g., emphysema, pneumoconiosis, silicosis, chronic bronchitis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and chronic obstructive airways disease), vibration white finger, occupational deafness, occupational stress, contact dermititis, and repetitive strain injury cases. If the negligence of another party can be proved, the injured party may be entitled to monetary compensation from that party. In the United States, this system is complex and controversial, with critics calling for various forms of tort reform. From: Motorcycle Accident Attorneys Orange County. Attorneys and lawyers often represent clients on a “contingency basis,” in which the attorney’s fee is a percentage of the plaintiff’s eventual compensation, payable when the case is resolved. Oftentimes, having an attorney becomes essential because cases become extremely complex, such as in medical malpratice cases. From: Motorcycle Accident Attorneys Orange County.
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