BigShinyThing

Think Secret ‘reveals’ today that Apple’s Mac mini will be reborn with an Intel processor and PVR-like functionality. Code named ‘Kaleidoscope’, the machine will be ready for roll out at Macworld Expo San Francisco in January.

The new ‘do it all’ Mac mini is also said to have a built-in iPod dock, a feature removed from the Mac mini Apple first introduced a year ago. According to the report, sources with knowledge of the project have called the PVR aspect a ‘TiVo Killer’.

Via PVRBlog.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that TiVo Inc. is partnering with Interpublic, Omnicom and Publicis’s media buyers with a mind to target consumers who can skip ads using their TiVo DVR. Tom Rogers, TiVo’s president and chief executive says that they are “flipping the dynamic” of traditional tv advertising by allowing subscribers to search for ads that only match their interests. This copies the Google model of advertising where only ads relevant to a keyword search appear.

Starting next spring, TiVo users will be able to set up a profile of products on their television screens by clicking on categories such as automative or travel or by typing in keywords like ‘BMW’. TiVo will then regularly download relevant commercials to TiVo recorders over the Internet, or send the video via traditional broadcast signals. The commercials will appear on-screen in a folder next to the list of television shows TiVo viewers record. Advertisers will be able to select the keywords and categories with which they wish to be associated. One payment model being discussed is to let advertisers bid on keywords as they do when buying ads on Google.

It remains to be seen whether viewers will buy-in to this model of ‘advertising on demand’, particularly when a major part of TiVo’s charm has been to allow them to avoid advertising all together. Moreover, Google’s success lies in the subtlety of the advertising message - with many consumers failing to notice the difference between a paid-for search result and a normal one.

Time lapse footage of the Panama Canal. 1 week compressed into 11 minutes by Stephan van der Palen. Van der Palen explains:

This is a time lapse video i made from the mireflores lock’s webcam. I grabbed the stills with my selfmade program Webcam Thief [sounds great! -- ed] and stitched them together with my selfmade program PhotoLapse.

Via BoingBoing.

Pictured - George Best by The Wedding Present.

Google Base, Google Video, Google News, Google mail … It’s all getting very Googlefied out there. This week, Wired published a nice precis of exactly what Google is up to and who feels threatened. A quicker fear fix is available via the short film Googlezon which we featured a while back and which managed to even freak out Rupert Murdoch.

In a more recent twist of Google Fear, historian Charles Dyson alleges that Google’s book scanning project has a far loftier purpose than any of us imagined - the creation of artificial intelligence. Dyson has written about his visit to Google’s HQ:

My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

Dyson’s treatise on the power of Google is readable in full on Edge.org.

UPDATE: In an Economist article on Google published 14th Jan 06, Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future had this to say:

Google is a religion posing a company… they’re trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test (in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as human in written conversations).

You read it here first.

According to the authorities, eight of the 10 suspects shown on billboards in the Kansas City, Missouri, area have been arrested, seven of them because of the billboards. But the ads raise legal concerns for Marc Mezibov, a defense attorney in Cincinnati, where the city’s first wanted billboard was went up recently.

If a client’s face and name were posted on billboards ascribing some horrendous crime to him, I would certainly raise issues with the court about whether he could receive a fair trial

he said, adding that he might request the trial be moved.

Police in the UK are already copying the FBI’s legendary ‘most wanted’ site: maybe it’s only a matter of time before we see posters like these on the side of the no. 38 bus.

CNN has the full story.

One of his projects, Let Them Sing It for You, allows the user to type in a word or a phrase and then have it sung back via clips from pop music. He does other, much more tortuous things, such as freezing Lou Reed’s vocals on ‘Heroin’ into one droning loop.

Found on BoingBoing.

The full film is on the weirdhat site. It demonstrates beautifully the formula of Lucas’s films: “In a galaxy, far, far away …etc.” Or as Mr Weirdhat writes:

Okay, holy crap. This is awesome. I think it justifies the whole thing, and I’m only four minutes into it. The first appearance of Palpatine in TPM and AOTC is ON THE SAME FRAME. And at the same time in ROTJ, Vader is telling Moff Jerjerrod that the Emperor is coming.

At the moment, BitTorrent’s technology can be used for illegally copying movies and TV shows over the Internet. While downloading a movie, BitTorrent’s technology takes parts of the file from different sources simultaneously, thereby facilitating a quicker download of the movie - what geeks term peer to peer or P2P.

Under the terms of this agreement, Bram Cohen, founder and CEO of BitTorrent, has agreed to remove links which direct users to pirated content. It is said that the deal might also pave the way for eventual adoption of BitTorrent’s technology by movie studios for new, legal services. Bittorrent is currently used by an estimated 45 million people and has become a bete noire for the movie and TV industries. This move signals Cohen’s intent to cuddle up to the mainstream - potentially with an eye on future legitimate content distribution deals. He even disclosed in September that his company had raised $8.75 million in venture funding to develop commercial distribution tools for media companies.

However, as Wired points out, the decentralised nature of P2P technology means that piracy remains hard to trace and prevent. This agreement with Cohen will not prevent determined internet users from finding movies or other materials using tools or websites other than Cohen’s, it simply removes the most high profile player from that particular game.

Legendary photographer Helmut Newton had a strictly no-bullshit attitude towards the commercial aspects of his work and a new book of his fashion work, Gun for Hire, celebrates this.

Newton’s appeal was politely explained by Tom Ford at the US Vogue memorial service July 2004:

I knew Helmut long before I actually met him. It was in part his photographs that inspired me to become a fashion designer. His world spoke to me. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world of big nudes, or strap on a saddle and be ridden around the room by a girl with a monocle and sleek riding boots or taken from behind by a handsome man while wearing a lame evening dress and big diamonds while a porn film flickered in the background? This was a world I could relate to.

In today’s politically correct world, Helmut’s images are as fresh and sharp as ever because they speak to something fundamental, something some might call base. Helmut’s pictures were never dull. They were never safe. They were never mundane or mediocre. And in a world of mediocrity, they were and are absolutely piercing.

Helmut’s world was my idea of Heaven. And his world is where I would like to go when I die.

These photographs were published in The Independent magazine a few months back. They were taken by Laura Ashley’s daughter Jane who happened to be at art school with Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. In 1976 they were in the process of forming The Clash and Viv Albertine (pictured, with Simonon) later played guitar in the all girl punk band, The Slits. Everyone was, of course, completely broke and so well up for doing a photoshoot for £30. The photos were never used because Laura Ashley herself refused to display them on her shop walls.

In an interview with The Independent, Jane Ashley explained how the shoot was originally intended as a way to reconcile her flouncy, deeply unhip family background with her mates in the burgeoning punk movement. But the shoot also exposed the conservatism and strictures of punk itself - typical of an apparently ‘liberating’ subculture. Viv Albertine remembers:

It was quite a brave thing to do, but we really needed the money. It was such a judgmental time: you had to be so precise - no corduroy, no flares, wearing brown was a sin. But even a punk likes to dress up sometimes and look like a girl, and the boys were pleased to see us in long dresses. I was going out with Mick at the time and he said I looked lovely.

Ashley, however, gets the last word on her incongruous photos:

These extraordinarily creative times in our lives are also full of drama and conflict. Those pictures of Viv and the Clash helped me resolve conflicts about my identity. Isn’t that what creativity is for?

TiVo will release TiVoToGo recordings in formats specifically for the Playstation Portable and the video iPod. The enhanced feature will also add more copyright-protection measures in an attempt to stem piracy. However, as MIT points out, the big television networks are still pissed off:

TiVo’s plan to allow users to download TV shows and films to Apple’s iPod and Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) could strain relations with networks and studios hoping to develop revenue streams from digital distribution. Several TV and studio execs told Daily Variety that they were considering legal action against the company.

Story via the ever-dedicated PVR blog.

Meanwhile New Scientist magazine has spotted a TiVo patent application which suggests that the company is “working on a PVR that will recognise one of several individual users, and respond to their personal preferences.” The patent application describes the invention as “a multimedia mobile personalization system [which] provides a remote control that detects a user’s electronic tag, e.g. an RFID tag.” In other words, a PVR that will recognise one of several individual users, and respond to their personal preferences. Every member of a family could have a personal radio frequency tag – embedded in clothing or a piece of jewellery, for example – and the PVR’s remote control would recognise the closest tag. It would then send a corresponding ID signal to the recorder which would use the personal preferences it has built up for the tag-wearer only. TiVo users (like iPod users) already feel like their machine ‘knows them’ - “my iPod shuffle recognised my mood today” - “TiVo predicts what I want to watch …. no, really”. This just shifts the technology one step further inside Our Minds.

TiVoToGo also promises personalized viewing at a variety of locations, detailing how TiVo might forward stored shows from home to a TV in a hotel room, for example. As Slashdot points out, it remains to be seen whether hotels will be eager to help TiVo undermine their pay-per-view video revenue. But then most of that’s porn is it not?

Talk about knowing your audience … The project launches in association with Vision TV and the headlines will be fed to plasma screens in more than 250 hairdressers across the UK, including the Redken chain in London. The service will be enabled by Vision TV by means of an RSS feed, which is already used to direct headlines from hellomagazine.com to computers. The headlines will appear on the screen alongside the website’s selected celebrity picture of the day.

Via Marketing Week.

Since I first “coined” the term circa 1989 in various reports I wrote for Wall Street and business audiences and obtained this email address [newmedia at aol.com] in 1992 while on the AOL roadshow from Steve Case, perhaps my original definition would be a curiousity.

New media is whatever replaces television.

That’s all there is to it,

Mark Stahlman
New Media Laboratory
New York

He’s right.

This has also enabled brands to appropriate bygone glamour like never before. Witness Alexander McQueen’s referencing of Hitchcock blondes in his Autumn/Winter 2005/06 collection. And Cointreau’s latest twist on the ‘be cointreauversial’ (ouch) campaign features classic Getty images reappropriated for the brand. The prom blurb for the exhibition reads, “Cointreau and Getty Images Gallery present a tantalizing exhibition of photographs celebrating cointreauversial women with strength of spirit and a timeless sense of style”. Coincidentally, of course, it features archive images of icons such as Liz Taylor quaffing cocktails.

In the meantime, video iPods are seeing a rush for obscure 1960s shows that the networks no longer show (as well as the obligatory porn) and AOL have announced plans to release loads of classic TV online — maybe the first sensible thing the company has done as a result of its time up with Time Warner.

Now that everything is accessible — and so easily — what’s left to plunder?

We dispatched our agents to check out the much-hyped Stella McCartney collection at H&M which launched officially today. After fighting their way through London’s most vicious fashionistas, Sarah and Sophie grabbed some ‘looks’ instore on a mobile phone, then beamed them out into BSTflickr photostream. Guerrilla photoshoot? We call it ‘mobeling‘.

With Big Thanks to Sophie and Sarah who came back with narry a scratch.

And it looks like we’re not the only ones … see flickr tag ’stella’.

According to Vogue, when fashion buyer Yasmine Sewell discovered that Michael Pearce, the man credited with bringing Ugg to the UK (yeah thanks), had bought the global license in a bid to relaunch the much-loved brand, she snapped up a number of pieces for the store. “They’re redoing some of the old archive pieces and some new stuff,” says Sewell. “It’s the same label and the same feeling. It’s incredibly exclusive and just gorgeous. They’re even using the original Biba lasts for the shoes.” Designed by Tony Cappiello, with creative direction from Pearce, the first collection will feature bags and shoes while, for autumn/winter 2005-6, Bella Freud and Fiona Knapp will add clothes and jewellery into the equation.

Here’s hoping that this relaunch is more successful that the 1990s one - the remnants of which are still knocking around eBay. For a reminder of what the original shop was like, check out Biba: The Biba Experience and In Biba.

We fell over this short whilst reading RSS feeds — as you do.

It’s directed by Philip Hunt and features William Burroughs reading his poem Ah Pook is Here. The music is by John Cale and the animation is sick-inducingly brilliant.

Via/via BoingBoing.

Slashdot reports today on a leaked memo from Microsoft which demonstrates just how much the tech giant has been caught on the back foot over online advertising. Even if it proves to be false, Microsoft have admitted as much through recent iniatives to invest in search advertising - see previous post.

The post reads:

daria42 writes “An e-mail memo sent from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to top execs at Microsoft has been leaked, revealing the executive wants his company to hurriedly change its focus and start to tap online advertising and services as new revenue sources. In the e-mail, Gates cites another, earlier memo, sent from MS exec Ray Ozzie, in which Ozzie also warns MS of the importance of focusing on the online medium. ‘It’s clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk,’ Ozzie wrote. ‘We must respond quickly and decisively. We should’ve been leaders with all our web properties in harnessing the potential of Ajax, following our pioneering work in OWA (Outlook Web Access),’ he continued. ‘We knew search would be important, but through Google’s focus they’ve gained a tremendously strong position.’

More from the leak on ZDnet.

The BBC website reports that BBC director general Mark Thompson has pledged to deliver free-to-air HDTV on all BBC digital platforms “as soon as practical”, which is expected to be by about 2010.

The BBC trials aim to test out how HDTV broadcasts are transmitted and received. The corporation said they would not affect the reception of current channels.

Its trials are expected to last a year. The BBC has yet to decide how many participants will take part in the trials, or how they will be selected.

Sky plans to launch its own HDTV service in 2006, which will include live Premiership football.