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Making Bread

dani — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:13:56 +0000

Teba and Toni were here for a week.

Teba baked some bread. Here you have the videos:

What does English sound like to a foreigner?

dani — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:19:27 +0000

Extreme Sports

dani — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:27:46 +0000

US debt crisis explained

dani — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:03:46 +0000

Move

dani — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 17:10:19 +0000

3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films…..

= a trip of a lifetime.

move, eat, learn

Rick Mereki : Director, producer, additional camera and editing
Tim White : DOP, producer, primary editing, sound
Andrew Lees : Actor, mover, groover

These films were commissioned by STA Travel Australia: youtube.com/watch?v=-BrDlrytgm8

Thanks heaps to Adam Fyfe, Brendan, Simon and Crissy at STA.

All Music composed and performed by Kelsey James (kelseyanne.james@gmail.com)
Soundtrack available here:
itunes.apple.com/au/album/play-on-move-soundtrack-single/id456257170

Music Recorded and mixed by Jake Phillips

Colour Grade : Edel Rafferty and Roslyn Di Sisto
Online Edit : Peter Mirecki

Assistance in titles and production design : Lee Gingold, Jason Milden, Rohan Newman

Big Ups to Michelle, Kiri, Renee, Hana, Andre, Ross, Bernie & Julie for your patience and support and awesomeness…..

Huge Thanks to :
Marco, Juliana and Julio at GAP Argentina and Peru
Ariana Cardenas, Toni Figuera and cooltra scooters in Barcelona,
Abete Zanetti Glass blowing school, Murano, Venice (abatezanetti.it)
Annabel, Rosario and Carolina (Pitu) in France
Juane and Andrea from the Princeca Insolenta hostel in Chile

Thank you all for your kind words and encouragement. The response has been phenomenal and overwhelming. We never thought this little project would reach out to so many people

Time Lapse Video

dani — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 11:04:00 +0000

Terje Sorgjerd, the photographer behind the viral video The Aurora, has done it again. Here, Sogjerd captures the Milky Way over El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain. Click through to watch, and get details on how the video was made.

Filmed between April 4 and April 11, 2011, the individual frames were shot using a Canon 5D Mark II with a Canon 17mm TSE, Canon 16-35mm II, Canon 24/1.4II, and Sigma 12-24mm.

Just sit back and enjoy. It’s simply stunning.

The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

Sorgjerd writes, “The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide.”

I think the goal was accomplished!

Music is by Ludovico Einaudi, the song is called “Nuvole bianche”

(from http://shuttersalt.com/)

Mini Stove

dani — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 10:59:44 +0000

Panasonic Viera AR Setup Simulator app augments the reality of your TV dream (video)

dani — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:14:45 +0000

A cardboard cut-out, really? You pasted a 50-inch rectangle of stiffened paper to the wall in order to preview the flatscreen of your dreams within your new Vitsoe shelving system? For shame. A true nerd, nay, a real man would have cast aside those arts and crafts for Panasonic’s new Viera AR Setup Simulator app. Just grab the wall or pedestal AR marker from the printer and place it wherever you hope to showcase that new Panny. Then watch the app augment your reality through the iPhone’s camera. Don’t cost nothin’ but your time, starting with the 60 second video embedded after the break.

(from engadget)

Are we born to run?

dani — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:42:50 +0000

NYC – Mindrelic Timelapse

dani — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 07:38:22 +0000

NYC – Mindrelic Timelapse from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

the art of fly

dani — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:38:11 +0000

Wingsuit Basejumping – The Need 4 Speed: The Art of Flight from Phoenix Fly on Vimeo.

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears

dani — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 12:29:25 +0000

From the onion a very funny video

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears

Melinda French Gates: What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola

dani — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:02:46 +0000

Speedflying in Wengen 2010

dani — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 20:55:37 +0000

Children see… children do

dani — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:30:04 +0000

intelligent chimpanzee

dani — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:25:37 +0000

3D Video Capture with Kinect

dani — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 07:53:18 +0000

By combining the color and the depth image captured by the Microsoft Kinect, one can project the color image back out into space and create a “holographic” representation of the persons or objects that were captured
.

mimic octopus

dani — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 09:12:21 +0000

New MacBook Air 11 inches

dani — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 13:15:51 +0000

I just went downtown and I shot a little video of the new MacBook air. The small one.

It is damn sexy. I am a one laptop man, but I would even consider the new 11 inches as my next only laptop… wow

Space Ballon

dani — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 07:03:02 +0000

Anybody can take an HD camera, an iPhone and send them out to space ;-)

Take a 12 min trip on San Francisco cable car in 1906

dani — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:23:46 +0000

Take a trip back in time. This 11-minute reel of film, shot from a cable car on Market Street, captures a city full of life and promise, which was destroyed only days later in the great earthquake of 1906.

Playing music with iPhones on the tube

dani — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 09:56:54 +0000

Magic Pen: records what you write and what you say

dani — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:06:29 +0000

Livescribe Echo Smartpen is what I wish I had during my student times…

I have not played with it but I watch some of the videos they have on their website and looks amazing.

Basically it comes with a special paper notbook, where you write with this special pen. You can draw, write… everything is memorized. Then you have also a play, stop, pause at the bottom of the page to record the sound, so if the algebra teacher is doing something damn complicated and you are coping, it when you click in the physical netbook, you can listen what he said at that particular moment.

This is magic…

Also you connect it to a computer and you have all your notes… wow…

Jackie San vs. the Eye of Sauron

dani — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 17:06:21 +0000

It is just a GIF image… 3.3Mb but just a GIF…

Wingsuit proximity flying in Switzerland and Norway

dani — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:45:53 +0000

Ford Fiesta and 650Hp… and some skills…

dani — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 09:15:06 +0000

This is what you can do with a Ford fiesta with 650hp if you practice a bit. I do the same with my fiat 500.

One of the best time lapse video out there

dani — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:14:12 +0000

Timelapse Montage from Mike Flores on Vimeo.

Leadership in the age of social media

dani — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:03:00 +0000

From the Washington Post Charlene Li of Altimeter Group on how technology is revolutionizing corporate leadership–from BP to Apple. (Madeline Marshall, Elizabeth Tenety, Andrea Useem/Washington Post)

My morning run

dani — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:09:11 +0000

Future of Touch Screens?

dani — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:05:47 +0000

Gmail Priority Inbox to sort your messy inbox by priorities

dani — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:38:44 +0000

Google is rolling out Priority Inbox for Gmail. For Google apps user it will be rolled out next week.

The idea is to handle messy inboxes, by applying rules. Take a look at the video:

Youtube now opens a film section with more then 400 free titles

dani — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:17:46 +0000

You are not going to find blockbusters but it is quite a move for youtube: YouTube Movies

Browse movies, from great documentaries such as home to films nobody knows because probably they don’t have any rights, or they are so old that they have expired.

Anyway, take if there is nothing on TV, it is good to take a look. You might enjoy an old Jacky Chan movie ;-)

Voice Talker

dani — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:19:10 +0000

Facebook Places Video

dani — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 07:19:06 +0000

Downhill in a new Suit with Roller Blade Wheels

dani — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 07:18:39 +0000

Crazy guys…

Evo vs. iPhone: second round

dani — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:54:22 +0000

Video: An EVO 4G Salesman Confronts An iPhone 4 Shopper

dani — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:30:14 +0000

((created by TechCrunch Europe)

Steve Jobs at D8 conference

dani — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:23:00 +0000

Steve Jobs talks about flash

Steve Jobs on iPhone origin

Steve Jobs on Apple’s relation with Google

Steve Jobs on iAds restrictions

Steve Jobs on the Gizmodo Story (iPhone 4G stolen)

Steve Jobs on Television

Steve Jobs on AT&T

Why are we happy? How to fix the legal system and the science of motivation

dani — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:48:14 +0000

Three TED talks selected by Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational and the new Upside of Irrationality (launched on the 1st June).

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Ways in which regulations can choke motivation: Philip K. Howard and four ways to fix a broken legal system

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Google TV is here

dani — Fri, 21 May 2010 08:01:35 +0000

Google officially unveiled Google TV at its Google I/O conference.

Google is teaming up with Intel, Sony and Logitech for Google TV. The device is not designed to replace your cable or satellite box, but work alongside it: The goal is to be able to view web content and television content side-by-side from the same interface.

This concept is not new; companies like TiVo and Boxee have been attacking this space for quite some time. Google’s approach isn’t dissimilar to what TiVo is doing with TiVo Premiere, but Google has the brand-recognition and capital to potentially make mainstream adoption a reality.

Evernote Competitor Springpad Launches Killer Android App

dani — Thu, 20 May 2010 07:54:23 +0000

Springpad is an awesome app. Like Evernote, it allows you to save items in a virtual notebook of sorts.

But the app doesn’t stop at saving information; it also pulls in actionable links. For example, if you “save” a movie, you also save links to buy tickets for a local theatre or add that film to your Netflix queue. If you save a restaurant, that entry is accompanied by link to the menu and an Open Table link so you can quickly and easily make reservations.

The idea behind the app — that we no longer surf the web idly or without intention — has led to a highly effective product, one that’s just today launched in the Android Market. The app is free and also available as an iPhone application.

Users can make lists, save items by barcode, save images, save locations using geo-data only and access saved information from a variety of devices, including web browsers. And of course, users can choose to share items on the social web if they like.

Jeff Janer is Springpad’s CEO, and he was kind enough to give us a demo of the Android app today at Google I/O. Check it out, and if you’ve got an Android device, give Springpad and spin and let us know what you think.

The Future of News

dani — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:42:15 +0000

Following with the series of Jeff Jarvis videos, here another video that discusses about the business of news which is changing radically. The old-time economics of supporting a big newsroom, printing the news on paper and getting it to people’s doorsteps seems increasingly unsupportable given the exodus of advertising dollars to internet sites.

If you have dedicated half an hour watching this video, then you should read this very interesting article.

Click here on the left to have it here.

How to Save the News

PLUMMETING NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION, DISAPPEARING CLASSIFIED ADS, “UNBUNDLING” OF CONTENT—THE LIST OF WHAT’S KILLING JOURNALISM IS LONG. BUT HIGH ON THAT LIST, MANY WOULD SAY, IS GOOGLE, THE BIGGEST UNBUNDLER OF THEM ALL. NOW, HAVING HELPED BREAK THE NEWS BUSINESS, THE COMPANY WANTS TO FIX IT—FOR COMMERCIAL AS WELL AS CIVIC REASONS: IF NEWS ORGANIZATIONS STOP PRODUCING GREAT JOURNALISM, SAYS ONE GOOGLE EXECUTIVE, THE SEARCH ENGINE WILL NO LONGER HAVE INTERESTING CONTENT TO LINK TO. SO SOME OF THE SMARTEST MINDS AT THE COMPANY ARE THINKING ABOUT THIS, AND WORKING WITH PUBLISHERS, AND PEERING AHEAD TO SEE WHAT THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM LOOKS LIKE. GUESS WHAT? IT’S BRIGHT.

By James Fallows

PHOTOS BY ROBYN TWOMEY/REDUX (Above: Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist)

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.

Of course this overstates Google’s power to destroy, or create. The company’s chief economist, Hal Varian, likes to point out that perhaps the most important measure of the newspaper industry’s viability—the number of subscriptions per household—has headed straight down, not just since Google’s founding in the late 1990s but ever since World War II. In 1947, each 100 U.S. households bought an average of about 140 newspapers daily. Now they buy fewer than 50, and the number has fallen nonstop through those years. If Google had never been invented, changes in commuting patterns, the coming of 24-hour TV news and online information sites that make a newspaper’s information stale before it appears, the general busyness of life, and many other factors would have created major problems for newspapers. Moreover, “Google” is shorthand for an array of other Internet-based pressures on the news business, notably the draining of classified ads to the likes of Craigslist and eBay. On the other side of the balance, Google’s efforts to shore up news organizations are extensive and have recently become intense but are not guaranteed to succeed.

That this campaign is under way is surprising in its own right, as is its strong emphasis inside the company as a significant strategic measure. Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media. (What is the Craigslist vision for sustaining the news business? Facebook’s? Microsoft’s?) Google’s projects have hardly been secret, since most of them involve collaboration with major newspapers, magazines, and broadcast-news organizations. This April, the company’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, delivered a keynote address to the major news editors’ convention, telling them “we’re all in this together” and that he was “convinced that the survival of high-quality journalism” was “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Last December, he wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal announcing that Google would be going out of its way to devise systems that would direct more money toward struggling news organizations—rather than, as many in the news industry assumed, simply directing more of everyone else’s money toward itself. Publishing this in The Journal was a piquant touch, since the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, has frequently denounced Google’s effect on the news industry.

Still, compared with what it could have been saying about its strategy toward news companies, Google has undersold its efforts and rarely talked about them as an overall program with a central guiding idea. Partly this is because of the highly decentralized nature of most innovative effort at Google, which often takes place in “20 percent time”—a workday per week when developers can concentrate on projects they choose themselves. Partly it is because of the “permanent beta” culture at Google, in which projects are viewed as tentative and experimental long after they have reached what others would consider a mature stage. (The company’s wildly popular e-mail system, Gmail, officially graduated from beta-test status only last summer, after five years of operation by tens of millions of users worldwide.) And the news organizations that are trying out experimental approaches at Google’s suggestion and with its support have themselves chosen to be quiet.

But after talking during the past year with engineers and strategists at Google and recently interviewing some of their counterparts inside the news industry, I am convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google; that it is not simply a charity effort to buy off critics; and that it has been pushed hard enough by people at the top of the company, especially Schmidt, to become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world’s most important media organization. Google’s initiatives do not constitute a complete or easy plan for the next phase of serious journalism. But they are more promising than what I’m used to seeing elsewhere, notably in the steady stream of “Crisis of the Press”–style reports. The company’s ultimate ambition is in line with what most of today’s reporters, editors, and publishers are hoping for—which is what, in my view, most citizens should also support.

That goal is a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering. This is essential if the “crowd sourcing” and citizen journalism that have already transformed news coverage—for instance, the videos from inside the Iranian protests last summer—are not to be the world’s only source of information. Accounts like those are certainly valuable, but they will be all the more significant if they are buttressed by reports from people who are paid to keep track of government agencies, go into danger zones, investigate and analyze public and private abuse, and generally serve as systematic rather than ad hoc observers. (I am talking about what journalism should do, not what it often does.)

Google’s likely route toward this destination, however, differs in crucial and sometimes uncomfortable ways from the one the existing news business would probably choose on its own. The differences are natural, given the cultural chasm that separates a wildly successful, collectively cocky, engineer-dominated, very internationally staffed West Coast tech start-up from a national news establishment that is its opposite in all ways: East Coast–centric, liberal arts–heavy, less international in staff and leadership (more Brits and Australians than in the tech industry, fewer Indians, Chinese, and Russians), dominated by organizations founded in the distant past, and at the moment strikingly downcast and even panicked.

Here’s an important illustration of the difference: people inside the press still wage bitter, first-principles debates about whether, in theory, customers will ever be willing to pay for online news, and therefore whether “paywalls” for online news can ever succeed. But at Google, I could hardly interest anyone in the question. The reaction was: Of course people will end up paying in some form—why even talk about it? The important questions involved the details of how they would pay, and for what kind of news. “We have no horse in that race or particular model in mind,” Krishna Bharat, one of the executives most deeply involved in Google’s journalistic efforts, told me, in a typical comment. His team was already working with some newspapers planning to put their content behind paywalls, others planning to remain free and hoping to become more popular with readers annoyed when paywalls crop up elsewhere, and still others planning a range of free and paid offerings. For Bharat and his colleagues, free-versus-paid is an empirical rather than theological matter. They’ll see what works.

The deeper differences involve Google’s assumptions about what the news business will have to do to “engage” readers again—that is, make them willing to spend time with its printed, online, or on-air products, however much they cost. One Google employee who asked not to be named mentioned another report on journalism’s future and pointed out a section called “Focus on the User.” “They just mean, ‘Get money out of the user,’” he said. “Nowhere do they talk about how to create something people actually want to read and engage with and use.” On the topic of engaging modern users, Google feels very confident right now, and the news business feels very nervous. Apart from anything else, that certainty gap makes Google important to the future of the news.

Before describing how Google came to this point, what its engineers are trying to do, and where it all might lead, a full-disclosure note. Eric Schmidt of Google is an important figure in this saga. By chance, and because he and his wife were Atlantic readers, Schmidt and his family had become friends of my family long before he joined Google as CEO in 2001, and we have stayed in touch. For this story, I did not talk with him except in one official on-the-record interview in late March, after I had finished my other reporting at Google HQ.

LET’S START WITH the diagnosis: If you are looking at the troubled ecology of news from Google’s point of view, how do you define the problem to be solved? You would accept from the outset that something “historic,” “epochal,” “devastating,” “unprecedented,” “irresistible,” and so on was happening to the news business—all terms I heard used in interviews to describe the challenges facing newspapers in particular and the journalism business more broadly.

“There really is no single cause,” I was told by Josh Cohen, a former Web-news manager for Reuters who now directs Google’s dealings with publishers and broadcasters, at his office in New York. “Rather, you could pick any single cause, and that on its own would be enough to explain the problems—except it’s not on its own.” The most obvious cause is that classified advertising, traditionally 30 to 40 percent of a newspaper’s total revenue, is disappearing in a rush to online sites. “There are a lot of people in the business who think that in the not-too-distant future, the classified share of a paper’s revenue will go to zero,” Cohen said. “Stop right there. In any business, if you lose a third of your revenue, you’re going to be in serious trouble.”

You can’t stop right there, Cohen said, and he went through the list of the other, related trends weighing on newspapers in particular, each pointing downward and each making the others worse. First, the relentless decline of circulation—“fewer people using your product,” as he put it. Then, the consequent defection of advertisers from the lucrative “display” category—the big ads for cars, banks, airlines—as well as from classifieds. The typical newspaper costs much more to print and deliver than a subscriber pays. Its business rationale is as an advertising-delivery vehicle, with 80 percent of the typical paper’s total revenue coming from ads. That’s what’s going away. In hopes of preserving that advertising model, newspapers have decided to defend their hold on the public’s attention by giving away, online, the very information they were trying to sell in print. However that decision looks in the long run, for now it has created a rising generation of “customers” who are out of the habit of reading on paper and are conditioned to think that information should be free.

“It’s the triple whammy,” Eric Schmidt said when I interviewed him. “Loss of classifieds, loss of circulation, loss of the value of display ads in print, on a per-ad basis. Online advertising is growing but has not caught up.”

So far, this may sound familiar. To me, the interesting aspects of the Google diagnosis, which of course sets the stage for the proposed cure, were these:

First, it was strikingly not moralistic or mocking. This was a change, not simply from what I’d grown used to hearing at tech conferences over the past decade—the phrase “dead-tree edition” captures the tone—but also from the way Americans usually talk about distressed industries. Think of the connotations of “Big Auto” or “Rust Belt.” Whatever the people at Google might privately think, that is not how they talked about the news business. What was happening to the press, they said, was happening because of huge, historic technological forces rather than because of short-sightedness or backward thinking by publishers, editors, and owners. “This is a fundamental disruption of an industry,” Nikesh Arora, who joined Google six years ago and is now president of its global sales operations, told me, before detailing the top-to-bottom pressure on every part of the modern journalistic business model.

Next in the Google assessment is the emphasis on “unbundling” as an insurmountable business problem for journalism. “Bundling” was the idea that all parts of the paper came literally in one wrapper—news, sports, comics, grocery-store coupons—and that people who bought the paper for one part implicitly subsidized all the rest. This was important not just because it boosted overall revenue but because it kept publishers from having to figure out whether enough people were reading stories from the statehouse or Mexico City to pay the costs of reporters there.

“Newspapers never made money on ‘news,’” Hal Varian said. “Serious reporting, say from Afghanistan, has simply never paid its way. What paid for newspapers were the automotive sections, real-estate, home-and-garden, travel, or technology, where advertisers could target their ads.” The Internet has been one giant system for stripping away such cross-subsidies. Why look to the newspaper real-estate listings when you can get more up-to-date, searchable info on Zillow—or better travel deals on Orbitz, or a broader range of movie showtimes on Yahoo? Google has been the most powerful unbundling agent of all. It lets users find the one article they are looking for, rather than making them buy the entire paper that paid the reporter. It lets advertisers reach the one customer who is searching for their product, rather than making them advertise to an entire class of readers.

Next, and significantly for the company’s vision of the future, nearly everyone at Google emphasized that prospects look bleak for the printed versions of newspapers—but could be bright for the news industry as a whole, including newspaper publishers. This could seem an artificial distinction, but it is fundamental to the company’s view of how news organizations will support themselves.

“If you were starting from scratch, you could never possibly justify this business model,” Hal Varian said, in a variation on a familiar tech-world riff about the print-journalism business. “Grow trees—then grind them up, and truck big rolls of paper down from Canada? Then run them through enormously expensive machinery, hand-deliver them overnight to thousands of doorsteps, and leave more on newsstands, where the surplus is out of date immediately and must be thrown away? Who would say that made sense?” The old-tech wastefulness of the process is obvious, but Varian added a less familiar point. Burdened as they are with these “legacy” print costs, newspapers typically spend about 15 percent of their revenue on what, to the Internet world, are their only valuable assets: the people who report, analyze, and edit the news. Varian cited a study by the industry analyst Harold Vogel showing that the figure might reach 35 percent if you included all administrative, promotional, and other “brand”-related expenses. But most of the money a typical newspaper spends is for the old-tech physical work of hauling paper around. Buying raw newsprint and using it costs more than the typical newspaper’s entire editorial staff. (The pattern is different at the two elite national papers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. They each spend more on edit staff than on newsprint, which is part of the reason their brands are among the most likely to survive the current hard times.)

Publishers would be overjoyed to stop buying newsprint—if the new readers they are gaining for their online editions were worth as much to advertisers as the previous ones they are losing in print. Here is a crucial part of the Google analysis: they certainly will be. The news business, in this view, is passing through an agonizing transition—bad enough, but different from dying. The difference lies in the assumption that soon readers will again pay for subscriptions, and online display ads will become valuable.

“Nothing that I see suggests the ‘death of newspapers,’” Eric Schmidt told me. The problem was the high cost and plummeting popularity of their print versions. “Today you have a subscription to a print newspaper,” he said. “In the future model, you’ll have subscriptions to information sources that will have advertisements embedded in them, like a newspaper. You’ll just leave out the print part. I am quite sure that this will happen.” We’ll get to the details in a moment, but the analytical point behind his conviction bears emphasis. “I observe that as print circulation falls, the growth of the online audience is dramatic,” Schmidt said. “Newspapers don’t have a demand problem; they have a business-model problem.” Many of his company’s efforts are attempts to solve this, so that newspaper companies can survive, as printed circulation withers away.

Finally, and to me most surprisingly, the Google analysis reveals something about journalism that people inside the business can’t easily see about themselves. This involves a kind of inefficiency that a hard-pressed journalistic establishment may no longer be able to afford.

At a minor, practical level, today’s news organizations generally seem clumsy, at least from Google’s perspective, as they try to re-create their brand and business on the Internet. “The print world has gotten placing an ad in a newspaper or magazine down to a science,” Neal Mohan of Google, who is in charge of working with publishers to develop online display ads, told me. He said that for TV or radio advertising, the overhead and administrative costs of placing an ad might be 2 or 3 percent of the ad’s total value; but for the online news sites he knew about, simple, correctable inefficiencies might drive the cost to 25 or 30 percent. His team is working with publishers to reduce these “parasite costs.”

It was Krishna Bharat who identified a more profound form of inefficiency. As a student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, Bharat had written for the campus newspaper while taking his computer-science degree. “In a second life, I would be a journalist,” he once told an Indian newspaper. (When the Indian newspaper asks me, I will say: In a second life, I would be a successful Google executive.) He got his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech and was an early Google hire, in 1999. After the 9/11 attacks two years later, he grew worried about the narrowness of news he was receiving through the U.S. media. “I felt that we really had to catch up with the world’s news,” he told me. “To get a broad understanding, you had to visit sites in Europe and Asia and the Middle East. I was wondering if Google could do something to make the world’s news information available.”

This last statement is the kind of thing many people at the company say in utter earnestness. In Bharat’s case, it meant devising a system that would collect news feeds from around the world, automatically and instantly cluster them by subject and theme, and move them up and down in prominence based on how many sources in various parts of the world were discussing the same topic. A few weeks later, such an automatic news-monitoring site was up and running as an internal demo at Google. In September 2002, it went public as Google News, initially covering 4,000 English-language news sources a day. Now it covers as many as 25,000 sources in some 25 languages, all by purely automated assessments of the main trends emerging in news coverage around the world.

Except for an 18-month period when Bharat founded and ran Google’s R&D center in Bangalore, his original hometown, he has been guiding Google News ever since. In this role, he sees more of the world’s news coverage daily than practically anyone else on Earth. I asked him what he had learned about the news business.

He hesitated for a minute, as if wanting to be very careful about making a potentially offensive point. Then he said that what astonished him was the predictable and pack-like response of most of the world’s news outlets to most stories. Or, more positively, how much opportunity he saw for anyone who was willing to try a different approach.

The Google News front page is a kind of air-traffic-control center for the movement of stories across the world’s media, in real time. “Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” he told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

WITH THE DEBUT of Krishna Bharat’s Google News in 2002, Google began its first serious interactions with news organizations. Two years later, it introduced Google Alerts, which sent e-mail or instant-message notifications to users whenever Google’s relentless real-time indexing of the world’s news sites found a match for a topic the user had flagged. Two years after that, in the fall of 2006, Google began scanning the paper or microfilmed archives of many leading publications so that articles from their pre-digital era could be indexed, searched for, and read online.

Up to this point, the company’s attitude was that it was doing the news business a favor, whatever the publishers themselves thought. “Our anecdotal evidence was that [these and other news efforts] were driving users to better stories,” Eric Schmidt told me. “There was a set of publishers who recognized that with these tools, users were more likely to visit their Web sites”—and in turn increase the publisher’s online audience and make online ads easier to sell. “There was another set who believed we were stealing their content.”

Google’s rebuttal to the claim of stealing is that it doesn’t sell ads on the Google News site, and moreover provides hardly any of the newspapers’ original content. Indeed, in this practice it is the opposite of “aggregators” like the Huffington Post, which often “excerpt” enough of someone else’s story that readers don’t bother to click through to the source. Google News gives only a set of headlines and two-line links meant to steer traffic (and therefore ad potential) to the news organization that first ran the story.

With this approach, Google has in a curious way re-created the “bundled” approach that it has helped destroy for newspapers. Virtually all of Google’s (enormous) revenue comes from a tiny handful of its activities: mainly the searches people conduct when they’re looking for something to buy. That money subsidizes all the other services the company offers—the classic “let me Google that” informational query (as opposed to the shopping query), Google Earth, driving directions, online storage for Gmail and Google Docs, the still-money-losing YouTube video-hosting service. Structurally this is very much like the old newspaper bargain, in which the ad-crammed classified section, the weekly grocery-store pullout, and other commercial features underwrote state-house coverage and the bureau in Kabul. Bundling worked for newspapers, as long as they offered things that readers couldn’t get elsewhere, to a wide swath of the public. Google’s version depends on its loss-leader services, like search and mail, being so central to modern online life that, when people do their less frequent but more valuable commercial searches, they’ll stay inside Google’s world. This in turn depends on the existence of information worth searching for, which brings us back to the predicament of the press.

“About two years ago, we started hearing more and more talk about the decline of the press,” Schmidt told me. “A set of people [inside the company] began looking at what might be the ways we could help newspapers.”

Why should the company bother? Until recently, I would have thought that the answer was a combination of PR concerns and Schmidt’s personal interest. On the PR front, one news official recounted a conversation two years ago in which Schmidt said that whether or not Google was responsible for journalism’s business problems, it did not want to be seen as “the vulture picking off the dead carcass of the news industry.” Unlike the two Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Schmidt is well connected in the news business and at ease with the media. His wife, Wendy, has a degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Brin’s family experience with repression in the old Soviet Union is universally assumed to have shaped his uncompromising stance toward repression in today’s China. His parents brought him from Moscow to Maryland when he was a child; by all accounts, it was Brin who drove the recent change in Google’s policy toward China. Schmidt is just as widely assumed to have driven Google’s efforts on the press. But, significantly, he’s no longer the only one.

Before this year, when I asked Google employees about the health of the news business, their answers often seemed dutiful. During my interviews this year, people sounded as if they meant it. Google is valuable, by the logic I repeatedly heard, because the information people find through it is valuable. If the information is uninteresting, inaccurate, or untimely, people will not want to search for it. How valuable would Google Maps be, if the directions or street listings were wrong?

Nearly everyone I spoke with made this point in some way. Nikesh Arora’s version was that Google had a “deeply symbiotic relationship” with serious news organizations. “We help people find content,” he told me. “We don’t generate content ourselves. As long as there is great content, people will come looking for it. When there’s no great content, it’s very hard for people to be interested in finding it. That’s what we do for a living.” As Chris Gaither, a former technology reporter for the Los Angeles Times who joined Google last year as a communications manager for the news team, put it, “We believe in making information accessible. The surest way to make it inaccessible is if it doesn’t get created in the first place. That is why it is in our interest to deal with the problems of the industry.” (Small-world department: Gaither worked at The Atlantic as an intern in the mid-1990s and was a student in a class I taught at Berkeley’s journalism school nine years ago.)

“For the last eight years, we mainly focused on getting the algorithms better,” Krishna Bharat said, referring to the automated systems for finding and ranking items in Google News. “But lately, a lot of my time has gone into thinking about the basis on which the product”—news—“is built. A lot of our thinking now is focused on making the news sustainable.”

SO HOW CAN news be made sustainable? The conceptual leap in Google’s vision is simply to ignore print. It’s not that everyone at the company assumes “dead tree” newspapers and magazines will disappear. Schmidt and others talk about how much easier and more efficient it is to assess, at a glance, stories on a broadsheet newspaper page than to click through to see the full text on a screen. Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, told the Washington Post editorial board two years ago, “There will be no newspapers, no magazines, that are delivered in paper form” by 2020. (Ballmer later made clear that there might be small exceptions.) No one I spoke with at Google went quite that far. But all of their plans for reinventing a business model for journalism involve attracting money to the Web-based news sites now available on computers, and to the portable information streams that will flow to whatever devices evolve from today’s smart phones, iPods and iPads, Nooks and Kindles, and mobile devices of any other sort. This is a natural approach for Google, which is, except for its Nexus One phone, a strictly online company.

The three pillars of the new online business model, as I heard them invariably described, are distribution, engagement, and monetization. That is: getting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads. Conveniently, each calls on areas of Google’s expertise. “Not knowing as much about the news business as the newspapers do, it is unlikely that we can solve the problems better than they can,” Nikesh Arora told me. “But we are willing to support any formal and informal effort that newspapers or journalists more generally want to make” to come up with new sources of money.

In practice this involves projects like the ones I’m about to describe, which share two other traits beyond the “distribution, engagement, monetization” strategy that officially unites them. One is the Google concept of “permanent beta” and continuous experimentation—learning what does work by seeing all the things that don’t. “We believe that teams must be nimble and able to fail quickly,” Josh Cohen told me. (I resisted making the obvious joke about the contrast with the journalism world, which believes in slow and statesmanlike failure.) “The three most important things any newspaper can do now are experiment, experiment, and experiment,” Hal Varian said.

In fact, such advice is both natural and inconceivable for most of today’s journalists. Natural, in that every book, every article, every investigative project, every broadcast is its own form of pure start-up enterprise, with nothing guaranteed until it’s done (if then). Inconceivable, in that news businesses themselves are relatively static, and the very name “Newspaper Guild” suggests how tradition-bound many journalists are. We pride ourselves on defending standards of language, standards of judgment, and even a form of public service that can seem antique. Whether or not this makes for better journalism, it complicates the embrace of radical new experiments.

The other implicitly connecting theme is that an accumulation of small steps can together make a surprisingly large difference. The forces weighing down the news industry are titanic. In contrast, some of the proposed solutions may seem disappointingly small-bore. But many people at Google repeated a maxim from Clay Shirky, of New York University, in an essay last year about the future of the news: “Nothing will work, but everything might.”

In all, Google teams are working with hundreds of news organizations, which range in scale from the Associated Press, the Public Broadcasting System, and The New York Times to local TV stations and papers. The last two efforts I’ll mention are obviously different in scale and potential from all the others, but these examples give a sense of what “trying everything” means.

Living Stories. News reporting is usually incremental. Something happens in Kabul today. It’s related to what happened there yesterday, plus 20 years ago, and further back. It has a bearing on what will happen a year from now. High-end news organizations reflect this continuous reality in hiring reporters and editors who (ideally) know the background of today’s news and in the way they present it, usually with modest additions to the sum of established knowledge day by day.

The modest daily updating of the news—another vote in Congress, another debate among political candidates—matches the cycle of papers and broadcasts very well, but matches the Internet very poorly, in terms of both speed and popularity rankings. The Financial Times might have given readers better sustained coverage of European economic troubles than any other paper. But precisely because it has done so many incremental stories, no one of them might rise to the top of a Google Web search, compared with an occasional overview story somewhere else. By the standards that currently generate online revenue, better journalism gets a worse result.

This past winter, the Google News team worked with The New York Times and The Washington Post to run the Living Stories experiment, essentially a way to rig Google’s search results to favor serious, sustained reporting. All articles about a big topic—the war in Afghanistan, health-care reform—were grouped on one page that included links to all aspects of the paper’s coverage (history, videos, reader comments, related articles). “It is a repository of information, rather than ephemeral information,” Krishna Bharat said, explaining that it was a repository designed to prosper in what he called “today’s link economy.” In February, Google called off the Times-Post experiment—and declared it a success, by making the source code available free online, for any organization that would like to create a Living Stories feature for its site.

“If you are asking, ‘Has this moved the needle for us yet in a financial way?’ the answer is no,” Vijay Ravindran, chief digital officer of the Washington Post Company, said when I asked him about the experiment. “But it has brought to the surface many different ideas for changing our technology, changing our user interface. The idea that [Google] would work with us on a product and take feedback was very positive. It’s almost unique, compared with working with technologists who view ‘content creators’ as raw-material suppliers and nothing more.” He said that simply being able to work directly with Google engineers was a plus, for the implicit lessons in how they develop products and what they know about user behavior.

Richard Tofel, the general manager of ProPublica, a new nonprofit news organization that conducts investigative-journalism projects, described a similar collaboration. When an article or documentary by a ProPublica staffer is ready, it is carried by an existing news organization as well as on ProPublica’s site. Tofel met Don Loeb, another Google manager working with news companies, at a journalism conference in Berkeley last year and mentioned that Google News and Google Web searches often featured the paper that ran the story but not ProPublica. “He was receptive to the argument, and said that if the search algorithm was not rewarding creators, they would view it as defective,” Tofel told me. Loeb and his Google colleagues later asked for illustrations of searches that slighted ProPublica’s role. Whether or not there was ever an adjustment (Google never discusses such matters publicly), ProPublica’s results now come higher up.

Fast Flip. The Internet is a great way to get news but often a poor way to read it. Usually the longer the item, the worse the experience; a screenful is fine, clicking through thousands of words is an ordeal. Moreover, the gap between the print and online experiences is greatest for those high-end publications that put a lot of thought and expense into elements other than words themselves: the glossy photos of a fashion magazine, the info charts and pull quotes of a mainly text magazine like this.

The Fast Flip project, which began last summer and has now graduated to “official” status, is an attempt to approximate the inviting aspects of leafing through a magazine. It works by loading magazine pages not as collections of text but as highly detailed photos of pages as a whole, cached in Google’s system so they load almost as quickly as a (human) reader can leaf through them. “It was an experiment in giving you a preview of an article that was more than just a link to the title,” Krishna Bharat said. “It gives you a sense of the graphics, the emphasis, the quality, the feel. Whether you would like to spend time with it.” Spending time with an article, whether in print or online, is of course the definition of “engagement” and the behavior advertisers seek. The online manager for a well-known consumer magazine, who asked not to be identified “because Google is too central to our existence,” said that each day, Fast Flip was sending his magazine tens of thousands of clicks, which in turn had increased his site’s ad revenue. “What we don’t know is how many people are staying just at the Google site, and how the money is divvied up, which makes us a little nervous about the proportional value.”

“We’re not saying we have worked out exactly the right model,” Krishna Bharat said when I asked about Fast Flip details. “We just want news to be available, fast, all over the place on the Internet.”

YouTube Direct. Projects like Living Stories and Fast Flip are tactical in their potential. Google’s hope is that broader use of YouTube videos could substantially boost a news organization’s long-term ability to engage an audience. Amateur-produced video is perhaps the most powerful new tool of the Internet era in journalism, making the whole world a potential witness to dramas, tragedies, achievements almost anywhere. The idea behind the various YouTube projects is that the same newspapers that once commanded an audience with printed reports of local news, sports, crime, and weather could re-create their central role by becoming a clearinghouse for video reports.

Steve Grove, a former ABC news staffer (and another onetime intern for The Atlantic) has worked at Google since just after it acquired YouTube, three years ago. His team has tried to establish YouTube as a news operation on its own, for instance as a center for footage from Haiti after the earthquake in January. But Grove is also working with newspapers and broadcast-news stations to encourage them to use YouTube clips (while Google bears the storage and upload costs) as a way of reestablishing their role in their communities. For instance, Google offers, for free, the source code for YouTube Direct, which any publication can put on its own Web site. Readers can then easily send in their video clips, for the publication to review, censor, combine, or shorten before putting them up on its site. After a blizzard, people could send in clips of what they had seen outside. Same for a local football game, or a train wreck, or a city-council meeting, or any other event when many people would be interested in what their neighbors had seen. The advertising potential might be small, for YouTube and the local paper alike. The point would be engagement. Al Jazeera used YouTube Direct during the elections in Iraq this spring to show footage from around the country.

If YouTube Direct had existed when I was living in China, I could have set it up to receive videos from people who had seen something worth sharing: the aftermath of a huge event, like the Sichuan earthquake; local effects of pollution; new buildings going up or old ones being torn down; the other daily dramas of modern China. Of course some sites already carry videos. And of course YouTube is often blocked by Chinese censors, so people inside the country might not see what their neighbors posted. Such complications aside, I could quickly see the potential of a tool with which people could easily share information in a new way. Setting up such a site is next on my to-do list.

Another tool extends the lessons of the YouTube Debates during the 2008 presidential campaign, in which Grove invited YouTube users from around the country to send in clips of brief questions for the candidates. Anderson Cooper of CNN then introduced YouTube clips of the questions CNN had chosen to use. They ranged from serious to silly and included one asking Barack Obama whether he was “black enough.” YouTube has added a feature that lets users vote for the questions they want asked and has used the method effectively many times since then, including for an interview Grove conducted with Obama at the White House early this year. “We feel this is a tool with tremendous potential for connecting newspapers with their audiences,” Grove told me. “There is tremendous leverage to this kind of reporting.”

Whatever comes of these experiments, two other broad initiatives are of unquestionable importance, because they address the two biggest business emergencies today’s news companies face: they can no longer make enough money on display ads, and they can no longer get readers to pay. According to the Google view, these are serious situations, but temporary.

Display ads. The idea for improving display-ad prospects begins with insignificant-sounding adjustments that have great potential payoff. For instance: Neal Mohan of Google pointed out that news organizations now typically sell their online ad space in two very different ways. Premium space—on the home page, facing certain featured articles or authors—is handled by “direct sales,” through the publication’s own sales staff. “Remnant” space, anything left over, is generally franchised out to a national sales network or “exchange” that digs up whatever advertisers it can. Publications decide on the division of space ahead of time, and hope the real-world results more or less fit.

One of Google’s new systems does for online ad space what the airlines’ dreaded “yield management” systems do for seats on a plane. Airlines constantly adjust the fares on a route, and the size of the planes that will fly it, toward the goal of making each plane as full as it can be before it takes off. The Google system does the same thing, allowing publishers to adjust the allocation of high- and low-priced space, second by second. “Your top salesperson might just have had dinner with the biggest client, who decides to run a big campaign,” Mohan told me. The dynamic allocation system ensures that the publisher doesn’t lose a penny of potential ad revenue to avoidable supply/demand glitches. If an advertiser wants to spend more on “premium” ads, the necessary space will be automatically redeployed from lower-value sections. “We think publishers should always monetize for the highest value,” Mohan said. He could tell that my reaction was “Duh!” so he went on to say, “Day by day, across billions of ad impressions, this makes a tremendous difference.” Yield management has allowed airlines to survive; according to Mohan, the advertising equivalent in Google’s new system “has generated a lift for publishers of 130 percent, versus what they did when dividing the space themselves.”

Mohan suggested a variety of other small but significant operational improvements, which together led to a proposal so revolutionary that it challenges all despairing conclusions about the economic future of the press. Newspaper and magazine publishers have felt trapped by the death of print, he says, because display ads in print have been such a crucial cash cow. The switch to online display ads has not offset the losses in print, since the “per eyeball” revenue from online display ads has been so much lower. (“Is that because they’re so much less attractive?” I interrupted to ask, adding, “A good print ad can look better than the article next to it, while an online display ad can just be a nuisance.” “No offense taken!” he said wryly: his life’s work is these ads.) Online display ads may not be so valuable now, he said, but that is because we’re still in the drawn-out “transition” period. Sooner or later—maybe in two years, certainly in 10—display ads will, per eyeball, be worth more online than they were in print.

How could this be? In part, he said, today’s discouraging ad results simply reflect a lag time. The audience has shifted dramatically from print to online. So has the accumulation of minutes people choose to spend each day reading the news. Wherever people choose to spend their time, Mohan said, they can eventually be “monetized”—the principle on which every newspaper and magazine (and television network) has survived until today. “This [online-display] market has the opportunity to be much larger,” he said. It was about $8 billion in the U.S. last year. “If you just do the math—audience coming online, the time they spend—it could be an order of magnitude larger.” In case you missed that, he means tenfold growth.

The best monetizing schemes are of course ones that people like—ads they enjoy seeing, products for which they willingly pay. Online display ads should be better on these counts too, Mohan said. “There are things we can do online that we simply can’t do in print,” he said. An ad is “intrusive” mainly if it is not related to what you care about at that time. (I pore over unadorned tiny-print ads in hobbyist publications I care about; I skip past beautiful pictures for, say, women’s fashion, which I don’t know about.) “The online world will be a lot more attuned to who you are and what you care about, and it will be interactive in a way it never has been before.” Advertising has been around forever, Mohan said, “but until now it has always been a one-way conversation. Now your users can communicate back to you.” His full argument is complex, but his conclusion is: eventually news operations will wonder why they worried so much about print display ads, since online display will be so much more attractive.

Hal Varian pointed out that people who read printed newspapers report spending an average of about 30 minutes a day with them, whereas online users flit in and out of news sites in an average of 70 seconds. Eventually they’ll spend more, if never quite as much as with a newspaper. At that point, he said, “you’ll be as valuable to advertisers as you ever were—if anything, more so, since advertisers can probably have a better-focused ad.” They won’t be telling me about strollers and toddlers’ clothes when my children are in college; they won’t be telling families with young children about leisure cruises.

“I am a growing-pie guy,” Mohan said, referring to the total ad money that flows toward news sites. (As a physical specimen, he is reasonably trim.) “The audience is there, and the dollars will follow. I would argue that publishers will ultimately do better in the digital world. That bodes well for everybody who is going through this shift.”

When I later spoke with Eric Schmidt, I asked whether this growing-pie proposition was a widely shared view. “It is my view,” he said. Maybe such statements will prove inaccurate, but considering the source, they can’t be ruled out as naive.

Designing the paywall. The other hugely consequential effort Google is exploring involves reviving the idea of “subscriptions”—the quaint old custom of an audience paying for what it receives. Most Google people I spoke with had zero interest in the paywall question as an abstraction, because it seemed so obvious that different publications in different circumstances with different business models will make different decisions about how customers should pay.

“If you go back through history, content has always been monetized across a broad spectrum,” Nikesh Arora said. “You could buy a journal for a $1,000 subscription price and an audience of 1,000. Or you could pick up a newspaper that is given out free on the Metro. People have adjusted their cost curves to their own form of monetization. The Harvard Business Review is not fretting about a loss of advertising [most of its revenue comes from subscribers]. The free Metro paper is not fretting about low subscription income. They have different business models, and the same principle will apply on the Internet.” Before, “publishing” meant printing information on sheets of paper; eventually, it will mean distributing information on a Web site or mobile device. That shift, according to Arora and others, will not force news companies into a limited range of business choices. If anything, it should allow for even more variety.

“We don’t want to encourage anyone to start charging for content, or not to charge for content,” Chris Gaither said. “That is entirely up to them.” But Google teams based in Mountain View and New York have been working with newspapers and magazines on the surprisingly complex details of making any kind of payment system work. Paywalls themselves come in a wide variety: absolute barriers to anyone who is not a subscriber, metered approaches that allow nonsubscribers a certain number of free views per day or month, “first click free” schemes to let anyone see the start of an article but reserve the full text for subscribers, and many more. Each involves twists in how the publication’s results show up in Google searches and on Google News. For instance: if you are a paid subscriber to the Financial Times, any Web search you run should include FT results—and indeed rank them all the higher, since your status as a subscriber means you place extra value on the paper’s reports. If you don’t subscribe, those FT links should come lower in the search results, since you won’t be able to read them—but the results should still appear, in case you decide you want them enough to subscribe. But when you run the search, how can Google tell whether or not you subscribe? How can it know that you are you, whether you’re using your computer, or a friend’s, or one at an Internet café, or an iPhone? And how can its Web crawlers index the FT’s stories in the first place, if they’re behind the paywall? All these questions have answers, but they’re not always obvious.

“We often hear from publishers saying, ‘We’re thinking of this approach, and we want to understand it fully,’” Josh Cohen told me. “‘We want to be sure this works the way we intend it to work. Can you give it a look?’We will tell them how their ideas would turn out with our system.” Then, without giving the newspaper’s name or the proprietary details of its specific plan, the Google team will also post its findings and advice on its public Web site. And for publications thinking of the “E-ZPass” approach—some automatic way to collect small per-article charges without slowing the user down or involving cumbersome forms—another Google team is working on the practicalities.

As for the very idea of paid subscriptions: How can they have a future in the Google-driven world of atomized spot information? “It is probable that unbundling has a limit,” Eric Schmidt said. Something basic in human nature craves surprise and new sources of stimulation. Few people are “so monomaniacal,” as he put it, that they will be interested only in a strict, predefined list of subjects. Therefore people will still want to buy subscriptions to sources of information and entertainment—“bundles,” the head of the world’s most powerful unbundler said—and advertisers will still want to reach them. His example:

“It’s obvious that in five or 10 years, most news will be consumed on an electronic device of some sort. Something that is mobile and personal, with a nice color screen. Imagine an iPod or Kindle smart enough to show you stories that are incremental to a story it showed you yesterday, rather than just repetitive. And it knows who your friends are and what they’re reading and think is hot. And it has display advertising with lots of nice color, and more personal and targeted, within the limits of creepiness. And it has a GPS and a radio network and knows what is going on around you. If you think about that, you get to an interesting answer very quickly, involving both subscriptions and ads.”

This vision, which Schmidt presented as utopian, helps illustrate the solution Google believes it will find; the problem it knows it can’t solve; and another problem that goes well beyond its ambitions.

The solution is simply the idea that there can be a solution. The organization that dominates the online-advertising world says that much more online-ad money can be flowing to news organizations. The company whose standard price to consumers is zero says that subscribers can and will pay for news. The name that has symbolized disruption of established media says it sees direct self-interest in helping the struggling journalism business. In today’s devastated news business, these are major and encouraging developments, all the more so for their contrast with what other tech firms are attempting.

The problem Google is aware of involves the disruption still ahead. Ten years from now, a robust and better-funded news business will be thriving. What next year means is harder to say. I asked everyone I interviewed to predict which organizations would be providing news a decade from now. Most people replied that many of tomorrow’s influential news brands will be today’s: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the public and private TV and radio networks, the Associated Press. Others would be names we don’t yet know. But this is consistent with the way the news has always worked, rather than a threatening change. Fifteen years ago, Fox News did not exist. A decade ago, Jon Stewart was not known for political commentary. The news business has continually been reinvented by people in their 20s and early 30s—Henry Luce when he and Briton Hadden founded Time magazine soon after they left college, John Hersey when he wrote Hiroshima at age 32. Bloggers and videographers are their counterparts now. If the prospect is continued transition rather than mass extinction of news organizations, that is better than many had assumed. It requires an openness to the constant experimentation that Google preaches and that is journalism’s real heritage.

The challenge Google knows it has not fully coped with is a vast one, which involves the public function of the news in the broadest sense. The company views the survival of “premium content” as important to its own welfare. But Schmidt and his colleagues realize that a modernized news business might conceivably produce “enough” good content for Google’s purposes even if no one has fully figured out how to pay for the bureau in Baghdad, or even at the statehouse. This is the next challenge, and a profound one, for a reinvented journalistic culture. The fluid history of the news business, along with today’s technological pattern of Google-style continuous experimentation, suggests that there will be no one big solution but a range of partial remedies. Google’s efforts may have bought time for a panicked, transitional news business to see a future for itself and begin discovering those new remedies and roles.

Jeff Jarvis on privacy, publicness & penises

dani — Sat, 15 May 2010 08:04:35 +0000

Jeff Jarvis interview with BestBuy

dani — Thu, 13 May 2010 09:30:08 +0000

“What Would Google Do?” author, journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis talks about the impact of the digital world on society and business and what it means for the future of Best Buy.

Jeff Jarvis: This is Bullshit

dani — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:41:55 +0000

As you know there are few books that I keep mentioning because I love. One of them is “What Would Google Do?” from Jeff Jarvis. I also listen every week to Jeff (Gina Trapani and Leo Laporte) in “This Week in Google” or TWiG. I follow him in twitter… so basically I like the way he thinks.

Here you have a video from one of his chats called “this is bullshit” at TEDxNYED.

It talks about lectures as an outmoded form of education and news.

Here are his notes (which won’t match the talk exactly). All the videos are now up at the TEDxNYED site.

animoto – create custom presentations

dani — Sat, 01 May 2010 11:06:45 +0000

I have discovered a very interesting website: animoto

Animoto does nice videos from your videos and images automatically. The output is pretty impressive and it is very easy to use. With the free account you get 30 sec videos.

Take a look at the one I just did for my son. It has taken me few minutes to do. Just upload some photos a couple of videos and write a bit of text:

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

windows phone 7 videos

dani — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:34:27 +0000

Top 10 Biggest and Best Jumps Ever

dani — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:34:56 +0000

YikeBike, foldable electric bicycle

dani — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:35:21 +0000

YikeBike is an electric foldable bicycle which is unique in design. Take a look:

What Happens When Malcolm Gladwell And Clay Shirk Can’t Agree On Social Media?

dani — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 07:49:00 +0000

Two of the smartest thinkers when it comes to media and business are Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky

Gladwell is the best-selling business book author of, Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What The Dog Saw and Shirky penned the “must-own” book, Here Comes Everybody along with being both a world-class media academic, speaker and pundit. Both have some of the most progressive business perspectives that have been put forth in the past decade, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that those perspective are not always on the same page.

Watch this..

But this might not be the Tipping Point for Social Media…

On Sunday, April 4th, 2010 the Globe & Mail published an interview with Malcolm Gladwell titled, Malcolm Gladwell: The quiet Canadian. Gladwell isn’t big into Social Media as this article points out: “His blog posts are biannual, his Facebook page is a placeholder and he has never ventured on to Twitter.”

So, what gives? What’s Malcolm Gladwell’s gripe with Social Media?

“There’s only so much you can do in a day. And I don’t feel I lack for platforms for expressing myself. I have books, I write for the New Yorker. If I gave people any more, they’d get sick of me. I have a Blackberry, like any good Canadian. I’m from Waterloo – how can I not have a Blackberry? I’ll leave it in my bag for a while or I leave the office and go and work in a café. I’m right now working on something and I printed it off so I can work away from a computer for a while. There are just all kinds of little techniques one uses to restore alone time.”

Fair enough, it’s not relevant to Gladwell because he already has many popular publishing platforms to spread his ideas, but does Social Media work for others? Can Social Media help bring ideas to a tipping point?

“Do ideas spread through social media? I don’t think they are vehicles. People aren’t spreading ideas on Twitter, they’re spreading observations, perhaps. The point of Tipping Point is that I was very interested in face-to-face interpersonal reactions. If social media or online communication is the means to the creation of a personal connection, it’s a fabulous thing. But if it’s an excuse to not make a connection, it’s ultimately a trivial thing.”

…And they’re both right.

(from twistimage)

10 Fantastic Photoshop Tutorials on YouTube

dani — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:47:53 +0000

Photoshop has been a mainstay of the design software pantheon for over 20 years, and it remains a great tool for pro artists and social media customizers alike.

But the sophisticated image editor has a daunting learning curve. With so many tools, features, and concepts to get a hold of, new users can be discouraged by dry help files and blind fumbling.

But fear not, gentle reader, for the collective wisdom of YouTubeYouTube is at your disposal. Photoshop tutorials abound on the video network. Some are superb, while others may not be worth your precious clickthrough. For help, check out the resourceful selections below. Whether you’re brand new to Photoshop or a seasoned veteran, there’s always something to learn from the screencasting community.

For Beginners

If you’re looking for a visual way to wrap your head around the basic functions of Photoshop, check out these “101″ resources that take it nice and slow, and don’t assume any prior experience.

1. Workspace Overview

If you’ve never taken up the virtual paintbrush before, get the lay of the land with this overview of the workspace. It will give you a good sense of where the most useful tools and menus live in Photoshop.

2. Tools and Layers

This two-part tutorial breaks down most of the basic tools you’ll need to start your graphic hacking adventures.

If you come away with only one concept from a Photoshop lesson, it should be about layers. Layers are key to everything in Photoshop, but jumping in head-first can often leave new users confused. In addition to rummaging through the toolbox, this video offers a concise, visual explanation of how layers work using a simple drawing exercise.

For Intermediate Users

If you’ve gotten a feel for the software and done your share of image touch-up and manipulation, you may want to kick the program into second gear and start exploring some of the more powerful and creative features. These tutorials will get you going.

3. Blending Modes

Blending modes are connected to layers and are integral for toning photographs and many other graphic manipulations. This screencast will take you through Photoshop’s many blending flavors and hopefully spark some creative ideas for your next epic FacebookFacebook photo.

4. Patching and Healing

So you’ve got your new Facebook photo perfectly toned for maximum epicness — except for that tiny blemish and your annoying little brother who insists on jumping into every frame. That’s where the healing tools come in. With these, you can remove unwanted elements and (with a bit of practice) smooth those adjustments right into the background.

5. Text Effects

Let’s face it: The black and white arial text your rendered in MS Paint simply won’t cut it as your blog’s logo anymore. It’s time to snazz it up with some creative texturing. Check out this two-part tutorial that showcases some of the powerful text manipulation tools at your disposal in Photoshop.

6. Creating Actions

As you start using the software more regularly, you may find you’re repeating the same processes (sizing, filtering, blending, etc.) over and over again. The “Actions” feature lets you record the steps you use frequently and execute them with a single time-saving click or hotkey combination.

For Advanced Users

If you’ve spent any time on the Internet, you surely know what some Photoshop wizards are capable of. While the truly amazing feats require actual artistic talent (for which there is not yet a software substitute), some advanced Photoshop knowhow can go a long way to impressing your social media pals. Even if you’re not up to speed on all the advanced tools, just following along with these example-based lessons will provide a lot of insight into how the pros work their magic.

7. Changing Eye and Hair Color

If you’re due for a new look, but don’t want to drop a pretty penny at the salon, check out this tutorial on how to change eye and hair color for some dramatic portrait results.

8. Photo Combination and Manipulation

And now for some of the cool stuff. Through some clever erasing, blending, smoothing, and layering, this tutorial grafts a roaring lion’s face onto an apple to make for some frightening fruit that even Adam and Eve would have stayed away from.

9. Environmental Effects: Beams of Light

If landscapes are your passion, you can add even more drama to your sweeping vistas with some Photoshop tricks. Here, the designer adds some cloud-bursting light to make for an awe-inspiring desktop wallpaper, or perhaps even a snazzy TwitterTwitter background.

10. Environmental Effects: Fog and Mist

If you’re looking to add a bit of mystery to your recent snapshot, check out this tutorial on adding some rolling fog.

Have you found any other useful Photoshop tutorials on YouTube? Be sure to post the links in the comments below.
(from mashable)

sex and the city 2 trailer

dani — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:55:20 +0000

Segway RMP bots used for sniper target practice

dani — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:15:54 +0000

iPad guided tours

dani — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 08:03:30 +0000

How ibooks will work

How safari will work

How mail will work

How photos will work

How iPod will work

How iTunes will work

How videos will work

How YouTube will work

How Keynote will work

How Pages will work

How Numbers will work

home made flying hovercraft

dani — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:17:29 +0000

Oblong Industries: minority report technology is here

dani — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:31:47 +0000

Is this the future of technology? The co-founder of Oblong, John Underkoffler, is the man who came up with the gesture-based interface used in the Steven Spielberg movie. And now he’s building it in real life.Welcome to spatial operating system:

Stop Motion T-Shirt War

dani — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:41:06 +0000

Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

dani — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:09:53 +0000

AIDS graffiti

dani — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:23:33 +0000

The Muppets: Beaker’s Ballad

dani — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:00:25 +0000

5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media

dani — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:06:24 +0000

As social media has become a game changer for industries across the board, you can bet the experts at this year’s TED conference will have their sights set on peeling back the hype and getting at the core of what social technology has in store for this year and beyond.

Perhaps the best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the organization’s website. Given the wealth of insight we’re sure to see tomorrow, we thought we’d whet your appetite by highlighting a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

1. Alexis Ohanian: How To Make a Splash in Social Media

We’ll start things off with a real-life social media parable about how the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the quick and hilarious story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all powerful, and it cannot be controlled.

2. Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History

In this talk, consultant, professor and author Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. From the election crisis in Iran to the massive earthquake that shook China in May of 2008, Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.

3. Evan Williams: Listening to Twitter Users

With a couple of anecdotes building the ultimate social media case study, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.

4. Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet Enables Intimacy

As social media changes our social lives, speculation has abounded for years on how the web may be disconnecting us from intimate interactions in favor of meaningless quests to rack up followers and “friends.” Not so, says Stefana Broadbent, who explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.

5. Seth Godin: The Tribes We Lead

From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.

(from mashable)

Tips

dani — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:34:46 +0000

Sleeveface

dani — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 09:13:17 +0000

Square: iPhone payment system

dani — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:58:33 +0000

A new payment system has been developed for the iPhone. Take a look to the video

Square is Jack Dorsey’s (Twitter co-founder) new startup that now has Kevin Rose (Digg founder) on board as an investor and YouTube pitch man for the prototype payment device that plugs directly into the iPhone’s headphone jack.

Fishing show bloopers

dani — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:37:26 +0000

Notable: provide feedback on websites

dani — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:06:03 +0000

Notable is an online tool that will allow you to easily provide feedback on websites.
Quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser. Works on iPhone, too!

Notable helps your team collaborate through visual feedback on screenshots, via a chaos-free process so that everyone can express their opinion.

Helicopter? there is an iPhone app for that

dani — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:13:28 +0000

Ardone has released a quadricopter that can be controlled with an iPhone or iPod touch. Take a look at the video, it is a super cool gadget… it works with wi-fi and has two cameras…

TuneUp

dani — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:00:52 +0000

TuneUp is a tool that will allow clean up your itunes digital music collections which are probably a mess… rename tracks like track01, add the cover, album and so… and automatically.

I did posted previously about another one: pollux but looks it does not work anymore….

Google Goggles brings visual search to Android; Favorite Places brings QR codes to restaurant reviews

dani — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:26:26 +0000

Looks like Google’s been busy on the camera tip lately — not only is it launching a new QR code-based Favorite Places mobile search product today, it’s also demoing Google Goggles, a visual search app that generates local results from analyzing mobile phone images. Favorite Places isn’t super-complicated, but it sounds like it’ll be pretty useful: Google’s sent QR code window decals to the 100,000 most researched local businesses on Google and Google Maps, and scanning the code with your phone will bring up reviews, coupons, and offer the ability to star the location for later. (It’s not implemented yet, but you’ll be able to leave your own reviews in the future.) Google hasn’t built this into the Google Mobile app yet, so you’ll need something to read QR codes with — Android devices can use the free Barcode Scanner, and Google and QuickMark are offering 40,000 free downloads of QuickMark for the iPhone today. We just tried it out using QuickMark and it works pretty well — although we’ll wait to see how many QR codes we see in the wild before we call this one totally useful.

Google Goggles is a little more interesting from a technology standpoint: it’s an Android app that takes photos, tries to recognize what in them, and then generates search results about them. Goggles can recognize landmarks, books, contact info, artwork, places, wine, and logos at the moment, and Google says it’s working on adding other types of objects, like plants. Pretty neat stuff — but how about linking these two services together at some point, guys? Check some videos after the break.

Kai having a bath

dani — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:08:42 +0000

what were they thinking?

dani — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:47:01 +0000

Christmas Lights

dani — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:38:07 +0000

Google launches real-time search

dani — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:10:17 +0000

Oasis of the Seas

dani — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:14:24 +0000

We were thinking about going on a cruise once our baby is born… so I looked for options, and I found a floating paradise. Judge for yourself, it is the world’s largest cruise.

The massive $1.5 billion vessel is nearly 40 percent larger than the industry’s next-biggest ship and five times larger than the Titanic. It has 2,700 cabins and can accommodate 6,300 passengers and 2,100 crew members. The ship also features various “neighborhoods” — parks, squares and arenas with special themes. One of them will be a tropical environment that will include palm trees. The Oasis of the Seas will embark on its first cruise on Dec. 5. Hundreds of onlookers turned out to greet the ship from shore.

Avatar movie: Thanator Chase

dani — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:54:06 +0000

More Avatar News & Previews

Surprised Kitty

dani — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:48:57 +0000

Death Star Canteen

dani — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:40:54 +0000

Spotify

dani — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:00:48 +0000

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We’re music lovers like everyone else.

We want to connect millions of people with their favorite songs by creating a product that people love to use. We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.

You will need to have an invitation (token) to get access as it is still in beta. There 3 plans, free (supported by ads) and two premiums.

There is also a nice iPhone app. This link is for the features and this for the price plans.

The iPhone app is superior to the Pandora or last.fm ones.

The interface is like iTunes (which is a negative point if you want it web based like pandora).

Unlike either Last.fm or Pandora, Spotify actually lets you pick the exact music you listen to, which is a plus.

Of course, there is a catch. In return for being able to access any music you want, you have to listen to occasional adverts, like radio ads with web links to the products. This for the free version. The ‘Premium’ account (a tenner a month, or 99p for a day pass) removes the ads entirely.

Google Maps Navigation Becomes Reality on the Android

dani — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:46:35 +0000

When it comes to maps, Google has had nearly everything: great satellite imagery, huge coverage, and even some basic navigation features, but not what everyone that’s ever used a GPS device really wants: turn-by-turn navigation.

This changes today, as Google just released a beta version of Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0. Here’s a quick overview of the features:

- Search in plain English – quickly search and navigate to places, businesses, landmarks
- Search by voice
- View of live traffic data over the Internet.
- Search along route – find locations near your current path
- Satellite view – you can view the same satellite imagery you’ve seen Google Maps, on your phone
- Street View – check out what the exact surroundings of a location look like

Google Maps Navigation does two very important things for Google: it makes it a competitor to established GPS firms like TomTom and Garmin, which should make this space a lot more interesting, and it suddenly makes Android – the only platform this app is currently available on – a lot more desirable. And – you guessed it – the first Android 2.0 phone to support this app is the upcoming Motorola Droid.

Check out a video overview of Google Maps Navigation and some screenshots below.

Microsoft: Integrated Videos and Maps for Driving Directions

dani — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:30:07 +0000

From Microsoft Research:

(a) Original spacing of panoramas. (b) Final spacing of video frames, after slowing down at landmarks/turns and speeding up between. (c) Straight ahead orientation. (d) Final orientation with look ahead. (e) Widening the view and freezing the landmark thumbnail. One frame of the route video. The field of view is automatically expanded to the left to emphasize the building landmark at this turn. The visual proxy is highlighted. Integrated video and mapping application. Abstract

While onboard navigation systems are gaining in importance, maps are still the medium of choice for laying out a route to a destination and for way finding. However, even with a map, one is almost always more comfortable navigating a route the second time due to the visual memory of the route. To make the first time navigating a route feel more familiar, we present a system that integrates a map with a video automatically constructed from panoramic imagery captured at close intervals along the route. The routing information is used to create a variable speed video depicting the route. During playback of the video, the frame and field of view are dynamically modulated to highlight salient features along the route and connect them back to the map. A user interface is demonstrated to allow exploration of the combined map, video, and textual driving directions. We discuss the construction of the hybrid map and video interface. Finally, we report the results of a study that provides evidence of the effectiveness of such a system for route following.

Music: Rodrigo y Gabriela

dani — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:05:25 +0000

Track your trips: Project Niu

dani — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:45:58 +0000

http://www.projectniu.org

Rovio Robot. The ultimate webcam

dani — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:45:45 +0000

Rovio™ is the groundbreaking new Wi-Fi enabled mobile webcam that lets you view and interact with its environment through streaming video and audio, wherever you are! With Rovio, you will always be just a click away from the people and places that are important to you.

Google docs improving

dani — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:53:28 +0000

Now there is an equation editor so you can easily complete problem sets online or write papers that include equations.

Also a “Go to page based on answer” option in Google forms, making it easy to show participants only those questions that are relevant to them.

To make outlining term papers more customizable, Google has made it easy to select different bulleting styles for lists by adding an option to the format menu. And when that paper is written and ready to turn in, you now have the option to print footnotes as endnotes for a cleaner-looking paper.

We hope these new features make collaboration in Google Docs even more convenient, whether you’re editing group presentations from across campus or collecting survey data from friends.

Indian music that takes you to another world

dani — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:34:34 +0000

Flyer Water Jet pack

dani — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:55:04 +0000

Rapping flight attendant

dani — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:49:06 +0000

Qnap 3.0

dani — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:05:21 +0000

Qnap has released the 3.0 firmware for their NAS products.

Take a look at the video. I start wondering if I should forget about running a full server at home… with this I could have my blog, my photos, and all my files… and even IP cameras… plus if you buy 2 you could have an offsite backup… to consider.

Indoor skydiving

dani — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:53:40 +0000

Wedding Proposal

dani — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:59:44 +0000

7s SevenSnap entertainment shopping for your iPhone

dani — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:46:55 +0000

Finally, it is online – the sneak preview explaining the idea behind SevenSnap. Take a look at the guide.

SevenSnap in a nutshell:

Every 60 minutes, we are offering you a product from the realms of consumer electronics, travel and leisure activities. To see the price of the product, which drops every second, you have to enter the Snap Room. Being in the Snap Room costs 1,– USD per minute.

If multiple people are in the Snap Room at the same time, the price of the product can drop by up to 100,– US Dollars per minute. The person first clicking on the “Order now” button gets the deal and the price drop is repeated from the top.
This system creates incredible saving opportunities and makes shopping a very exciting experience.

Now available for the iPhone.

Augmented Reality Navigation System

dani — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:23:43 +0000

Mobilizy GmbH reveals a preview of it’s augmented reality navigation system, the first fully functional mobile AR navigation system available for the Android platform. Wikitude Drive was developed by the Mobilizy Research & Development group in Salzburg, Austria, to satisfy the curiosity of the developers to see if it was feasible to combine real-time navigation with mobile augmented reality. The result of this quest is Wikitude Drive, a fully-functional, light weight navigational system which overlays point-to-point directions on a camera-view, without the need for maps.

Wikitude Drive boasts the following features:

* Mobile AR navigation, similar to a heads up display (HUD);
* Fully functional, map-less navigation;
* POI 2 POI navigation;
* Integrated voice commands (additional text-to-speech engine required);
* World wide navigational data which is accessed in real-time from the internet;
o (a mobile internet connection is necessary to access data while in motion)
* Peer-to-peer navigational functions
o Social navigational features will be implemented in future releases
* Interfaces with existing navigational APIs (for example: NavTeq, Map24, TeleAtlas)
* Launching for Android and iPhone soon.

sixthsense project: integrating information with the real world

dani — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:19:30 +0000

‘SixthSense‘ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.

Size matters: Star size comparison

dani — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:36:41 +0000

Monkey King Climber

dani — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:45:16 +0000

Nokia Booklet 3G

dani — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:33:25 +0000

New gadget from Nokia… not bad.

Projections

dani — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:40:39 +0000

Great TED talks on future technologies

dani — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:47:22 +0000

Building a techno-sixth sense

Mind control – closer than you think

Will death eventually be a thing of the past?

The ultimate reboot

Embracing an exponentially advancing future

CRISTAL

dani — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:04:04 +0000

The worlds fastest

dani — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:31:59 +0000

tokao.com » video

Making Bread

What does English sound like to a foreigner?

Extreme Sports

US debt crisis explained

Move

Time Lapse Video

(from http://shuttersalt.com/)

Mini Stove

Panasonic Viera AR Setup Simulator app augments the reality of your TV dream (video)

Are we born to run?

NYC – Mindrelic Timelapse

the art of fly

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears

Melinda French Gates: What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola

Speedflying in Wengen 2010

Children see… children do

intelligent chimpanzee

3D Video Capture with Kinect

mimic octopus

New MacBook Air 11 inches

Space Ballon

Take a 12 min trip on San Francisco cable car in 1906

Playing music with iPhones on the tube

Magic Pen: records what you write and what you say

Jackie San vs. the Eye of Sauron

Wingsuit proximity flying in Switzerland and Norway

Ford Fiesta and 650Hp… and some skills…

One of the best time lapse video out there

Leadership in the age of social media

My morning run

Future of Touch Screens?

Gmail Priority Inbox to sort your messy inbox by priorities

Youtube now opens a film section with more then 400 free titles

Voice Talker

Facebook Places Video

Downhill in a new Suit with Roller Blade Wheels

Evo vs. iPhone: second round

Video: An EVO 4G Salesman Confronts An iPhone 4 Shopper

Steve Jobs at D8 conference

Why are we happy? How to fix the legal system and the science of motivation

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? Ways in which regulations can choke motivation: Philip K. Howard and four ways to fix a broken legal system Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Google TV is here

Evernote Competitor Springpad Launches Killer Android App

The Future of News

How to Save the News

Jeff Jarvis on privacy, publicness & penises

Jeff Jarvis interview with BestBuy

Jeff Jarvis: This is Bullshit

animoto – create custom presentations

windows phone 7 videos

Top 10 Biggest and Best Jumps Ever

YikeBike, foldable electric bicycle

What Happens When Malcolm Gladwell And Clay Shirk Can’t Agree On Social Media?

10 Fantastic Photoshop Tutorials on YouTube

For Beginners

1. Workspace Overview

2. Tools and Layers

For Intermediate Users

3. Blending Modes

4. Patching and Healing

5. Text Effects

6. Creating Actions

For Advanced Users

7. Changing Eye and Hair Color

8. Photo Combination and Manipulation

9. Environmental Effects: Beams of Light

10. Environmental Effects: Fog and Mist

sex and the city 2 trailer

Segway RMP bots used for sniper target practice

iPad guided tours

home made flying hovercraft

Oblong Industries: minority report technology is here

Stop Motion T-Shirt War

Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

AIDS graffiti

The Muppets: Beaker’s Ballad

5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media

1. Alexis Ohanian: How To Make a Splash in Social Media

2. Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Ways in which regulations can choke motivation: Philip K. Howard and four ways to fix a broken legal system

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation