In-car projection for drive-by advertising. by Duncan Graham-Rowe

May 10, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

From Newscientist.

DRIVERS are already bombarded with advertising on billboards and vehicles. Now even car windows could become part of the advertisers’ canvas.

Wallen Mphepö of the Beijing Normal University in China has come up with a way to turn car windows into billboards that could be used to display dynamic adverts and public safety messages.

Mphepö has developed a polymer film that can be attached to a window to act as a kind of screen, picking up images projected from inside the vehicle and transmitting them to viewers outside through a series of microscopic mirror-like structures. Thin vertical strips of clear film in between these structures allow the driver to see through the window as normal, Mphepö says.

Advertisers could use GPS to tailor the ads to the area where the car happens to be, or the time of day. “There’s no point in displaying ads for a great breakfast place at a time when people are effectively looking to go to dinner,” Mphepö says.

He will present a prototype device that gives a 2D image at the Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles later this month. He believes he can produce a 3D image without the need for glasses by using the mirrored strips to display alternating images on either side of each transparent strip, angled so as to be viewed by the left or right eye. Mphepö ultimately hopes to design 3D cinema screens using the same micro-mirror approach.

The idea is interesting but could divert drivers’ attention away from the road, says Paul Green at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. Even though drivers are used to seeing adverts, “a dynamic display would cause you to look longer at these vehicles and that might be more of a problem,” he says.

He also worries that people will be unable to see into a vehicle with the display. This could hamper drivers communicating with gestures at road junctions, for example, which is why some states in the US have banned tinted car windows. But Mphepö’s display could enhance safety if used to display public information messages, such as changes in the speed limit or warnings of approaching hazards, Green says.

Mphepö adds that a 3D display might be the perfect way to get drivers to take in urgent alerts. “It is more realistic and brings the point home for drivers who might otherwise be speeding,” he says. Last year the authorities in Canada experimented with a 3D image on a road surface, showing a child chasing a ball, to see if it could make drivers slow down.

Filed Under: BUSINESS, WORK Tagged With: ,

Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book. By Brian X. Chen

April 28, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

From WIRED.
Former Apple engineers Kimon Tsinteris (left) and Mike Matas teamed up with Al Gore to create a new publishing platform called Push Pop Press. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

What do you do after working for Apple, a company whose mission seems to be nothing less than disrupting entire industries? Easy. You start a company to create your own ding in the universe.

That’s the idea behind Push Pop Press, a digital creation tool designed to blow up the concept of the book. Frictionless self-publishing is a fertile new space, but this particular startup got a little help from former vice president Al Gore, whose exacting demands on an app version of his book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis gave this would-be company its first real boost.

Developed by former Apple employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, Push Pop Press will be a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required.

“The app is the richest form of storytelling,” Matas said. “[Push Pop Press] opens doors to telling a story with more photos, more videos and interactions.”

Push Pop Press is pushing into a widening niche within the print industry, which is scrambling to produce digital versions of books, magazines and newspapers in hopes of reversing declining revenues.

The platform comes as a slew of competitiors seek to upend the book publishing business, a shift that once seemed improbable but now inevitable, thanks to the success of new devices such as the iPad, Kindle and Nook. Notably, Amazon began selling more e-books than printed editions just 33 months after its Kindle launched.

If e-books have been flying off the “shelves” for years, Push Pop Press aims to bring a new dimension to the platform, adding high-end graphics to the largely unadorned text offered in popular e-book editions like the Kindle. It’s the latest bet — still unpaid after some 25 years of digital publishing– that plain old text is about to undergo a major evolution as authors and readers demand more interactivity.

For magazine publishers and newspapers, one of the trendiest technology solutions involves creating iPad or Android editions of publications — for which advertisers, so far, seem to pay at rates which rival print dollars instead of web pennies.

The 800-pound gorilla in this digital space is Adobe, whose tools are used to create some tablet 280 periodicals (including the iPad version of WIRED magazine). But the complexity — and expense — of Adobe’s Creative Suite is an opportunity for new entrants in the self-publishing game.

Problem is, it’s neither easy nor cheap for dead-tree publishers to hire app programmers, or to purchase the resources necessary to digitize their publications with sexy code. And after factoring in the hefty costs of development and time spent on production, mobile apps have hardly proven a goldmine for major publishers.

If successfully scaled, Push Pop Press could become the easiest and quickest way for publishers and independent artists to turn their media into iPhone and iPad apps and take a whack at making money in the App Store.

Book apps created with the platform can take advantage of the iPad’s and iPhone’s advanced sensors, touchscreen gestures, microphone and powerful graphics chip to turn reading into a rich, interactive experience, Matas said. Videos, interactive diagrams and geotagged photos are just some elements that can be embedded in a book produced with the tool.

Not impressed with words alone? Check out Gore’s tour of his book produced with Push Pop Press, embedded in the video below.

Al Gore’s Our Choice Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

Al Gore’s Our Choice: Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

Gore’s App Mission

The former vice president’s production company Melcher Media approached Matas in September 2009 to create an app version of Our Choice. Gore wanted his book app to contain videos, diagrams and other forms of multimedia that would flex the iPhone’s muscle.

Matas sketched a concept and later discussed it with his former Apple co-worker Tsinteris. During his time at Apple, 25-year-old Matas focused on human-interface design for the iPad, iPhone and Mac OS X. And 30-year-old Tsinteris was deeply involved in developing the Maps app for the iPhone 3G, as well as some aspects of OS X.

After discussing the project, Matas and Tsinteris realized that in order to reproduce Gore’s book, they needed tools that didn’t exist yet.

“Kimon took a look at [the concept] and said that in order to build it we need to build a whole publishing platform,” Matas said.

And if you’re going to put that much effort into the tools, why stop after making just one book? The result of the project was Push Pop Press, a full-on publishing platform that the pair have been developing for about a year-and-a-half.

Gore’s book, which goes live in the App Store on Thursday morning, is in part a demonstration of the capabilities of Push Pop Press.

It’s a bit like walking through a digital museum. When you first launch the app, you see a cover of a 3-D animation of a spinning globe with the title superimposed over it. Tapping into the intro plays a video of Gore introducing the book’s topic.

From there, you swipe through a visual table of contents, and when you select a chapter, the chapter title appears on the top three quarters of the screen. A timeline at the bottom allows you to swipe through the pages. To start reading, you touch a page with two fingers to pop it open.

Diagrams embedded inside some of the chapters are interactive, inviting you to swipe the illustrations or even blow through the iPad’s microphone to move a windmill, for example.

Photos are geotagged, so when you select an image and tap on a globe icon, you can see a world map with a pin showing precisely where the photo was taken.

For the pair, geotagging was one of their favorite features to add, because at Apple, they worked together on integrating GPS in the Maps application for the iPhone 3G.

“It’s crazy how much context this brings to it,” Matas said about the geotagged photos in Gore’s book.

Every element inside Gore’s enhanced e-book is composed of native iOS toolkits and APIs (e.g., Core Animation, Core Text and Objective C) to make the experience extremely smooth and fast.

“This speed is something you can’t approach on a web browser,” Matas said.

Gore’s book is just the first of what Matas and Tsinteris hope will be a series of similarly interactive e-books. The pair are planning to release Push Pop Press as a piece of Mac software for anyone to create a book app in the future.

The programmers did not disclose an estimated ship date or price for the Push Pop Press publishing software, but they said the goal was to make it “very affordable.”

When released, Push Pop Press could aggressively compete with Adobe. Currently, many publishers rely on Adobe’s expensive Creative Suite tools to lay out their print pages and to digitize their content for Apple’s iPad.

Push Pop Press could likely undercut Adobe on price, not to mention ease of using the product. An interactive magazine, book, comic book or photo essay can be created with Push Pop Press in as little as 20 minutes, the programmers claim.

However, Matas and Tsinteris don’t view their software as a long-term competitor with Adobe. The software giant has a lock-down on the high-end of the creative field, Tsinteris said, and Push Pop Press’ core audience will likely be smaller publishers looking for an easy, drag-and-drop solution to create apps.

“This is a layout tool, not a developer tool,” Tsinteris said. “It’s a little like playing with Legos.”

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He recently wrote a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing June 7, 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

Filed Under: BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, WORK

Richard Ford on the Meaning of Work

April 18, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment
Author Richard Ford
I’ve always had uneasy loyalties about the relevance of the term “work” to the activities I perform every day, and which occupy the hours when most other people are in fact “working.” I write novels and stories and essays for a living. And while I fairly mindlessly refer to what I do as “work” (“I’m working, I can’t help you shovel the driveway”; “I start work every day at eight and work on ‘til cocktail hour”; “I’ve been working way too hard, I need a trip to Belize”), it’s hard for me to think that work is what I really do.

Work, after all — to me, anyway — signifies something hard. And while writing novels can be (I love this word) challenging (it can also be tedious in the extreme; take forever to finish; demoralize me into granite and make me want to quit and find another line of work), it’s not ever what I’d call hard. A hard job, okay, would have to be strenuous and pressurized (writing’s almost never that way). It would have to be obdurate, never offering me a chance to let up (I can quit writing any time I want to and come back tomorrow, or never). And it would have to be skimpy on personal-spiritual rewards (I’m always trying to do what Chekhov did…change the way some reader sees the world; so big rewards are always out there). In my view, being a first-year law student at Harvard would not be hard; but being a non-partnered associate at Skadden, Arps would be. Learning to play “The Flight of the Bumble Bee” on a Sousaphone would not be hard; but working on the dashboard assembly team for the Ford-150 would most certainly be. You see what I mean. Hard is staring into one of those mind-corroding x-ray machines at LaGuardia. Or taking tolls on the Jersey Turnpike.

A cavalier part of me would like to say that I endured the experience of hard work when I was young and quickly went searching for something better, possibly easier to do, and accidentally hit on writing. I’m not sure that’s altogether true, of course. I’m not sure, for instance, I ever had a hard job. I worked on the Missouri Pacific Railroad as a switchman when I was seventeen. I cleared land for the Neighborhood Youth Corps in Arkansas when I was twenty-one. I was a house detective and carried a pistol. I was a science editor for American Druggist Magazine. I even attended law school. But I can’t say any of that was really hard. And writing’s really no harder. Plus it’s a lot more interesting.

Indeed, a smug, self-aggrandizing part of me doesn’t really understand how anybody who’s not a writer gets along in life. Not only is writing easier than almost any occupation I know; but you also run your own operation; you have at least a chance to admire what you do and feel a kinship with the greats; you get to make excellent use (by sticking it in your work) of the constant flood of life’s jetsam – the daily freshet that drives most people crazy; and you have a chance to please total strangers with your efforts, and at least potentially, marginally make the world a better place. Plus, if you fail at all of that, nobody gives a fig – but you – and you soon get over it. True, you usually don’t make a lot of money, which is a drag. But I associate making a lot of money with jobs that are so tedious (and hard) that only big money would make you do it. My little job I’d do for free – and often have.

Why I routinely refer to what I do as “work” probably just reveals an old anxiety in me — the uneasy loyalty I already mentioned (although these days I don’t consider it very important). On the one hand, I usually refer to writing as work because I don’t know what else to call it. “Work” just seems easier. As cavalier as I am, it’d be cumbersome always to be referring to what I do as “my oeuvre,” or “my on-going inner confession,” or even just “my art.” In that way, “work” is my shorthand. Years ago, I was briefly a teacher of creative writing at the University of Michigan, and I had a young woman in my class who complained, sometimes caustically, about me always referring to writing as work. “Why do you have to call it work?” she’d say, scowling at me dismissively. “It’s oppressive. It’s demeaning and middlebrow. It’s just wrong.” This was 1973. My young writers were trying hard to affiliate their fledgling efforts with some kind of rarified, Pateresque art-for-art’s-sake gestalt. I was getting in their way with my proletarian vocabulary. They wanted me to stop it. I quit teaching, instead.

But I think the truth was—back then, when I was a young writer, myself, and maybe still is, now that I‘m getting to be an old one – my working-class origins were making their claim on me. Everybody worked in my family – from the day they could fit a shoulder to the wheel to the day they virtually fell under it. My mother ran the cigar stand in the lobby of the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs when she was fifteen years old (her stepfather, who managed the place, saw to it). My father worked from his mid-teens, throughout the Depression, and kept one job right through the World War and the fifties, to the day he died, whereupon my widowed mother went to work as a night auditor in yet another hotel. Not that this was unusual. Everybody we knew worked. My family initially recognized everyone we knew by the jobs these people held down. A job meant who you were, it gave early indication of what you were worth, it suggested something about your character as a provider and what you valued, about your hold on a secure future, about your grasp on moral responsibility and self-awareness. It was an easy index (probably too easy) for what the world needed to know about you. But if you didn’t have work, well, the world would find another index – which it sometimes did at your peril. “He doesn’t have a job” meant something specific to us, and it didn’t mean you were rich.

Me calling the writing tasks I undertake “work” is just, I’m sure, my effort to have it both ways – the way we writers always prefer it: to have it easy; but also to pawn myself off as a credible working stiff, a wage earner, a guy who has coming to him whatever real work might entitle him to – that modicum of respect, of self-esteem, of legitimacy in a culture where writers don’t really have a comfortable, secure place other than the best-seller list, or some college campus – venues where I haven’t spent much time so far. “Work” is my little assertion that when I do it, I mean it, and would like you to take it and me seriously. Just like a guy who works on the line at Ford, or who delivers babies, or who teaches in the inner city and comes home exhausted. Somebody who gives an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay – even if in my case that’s not always what I do.

Richard Ford, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, is the editor of the coming collection “Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work” (Harper Perennial).

Filed Under: WILD CARDS, WORK Tagged With:

Should You Pay for Web Content? By Cristen Conger

April 18, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

Like waiting for the ball to drop on New Year’s Eve, avid bloggers, journalists and online news junkies counted down earlier this year to 2 p.m., March 28.

At that designated hour, The New York Times erected the second paywall of the paper’s digital history, effectively ushering in what Advertising Age has dubbed “The Year of the Paywall.”

Then again, The Economist said the same thing about 2010, but maybe the magazine was just jumping the gun.

Paywalls prevent online users from freely accessing a website’s content, requiring a paid subscription fee in order cross the virtual threshold — not unlike buying a magazine from a newsstand or dropping a lump sum for regular delivery.

Rather than shooing people away until they meet the monetary demand up front, there’s more than one way to build a paywall, as the Times has demonstrated.

From 2005 to 2007, it blocked non-paying customers from reading its most popular opinion columns, while its newest iteration is a metered system that allows visitors to view up to 20 articles per month for free, and after that they have to pony up.

In fact, the term “paywall” has become a dirty word in the industry due to its money-grubbing reputation. These days, sites prefer to charge “freemiums” and offer “bundles” of paid content, such as an iPad app plus articles.

Metro daily Dallas Morning News put up a paywall a few weeks before the New York Times, and a number of smaller dailies are also poised to start charging for their online content later this year.

Given the size of the New York Times and the amount of traffic it attracts, the outcome of its paywall venture is being seen as a sort of industry-wide litmus test of whether print publications can get people to pay for their Web content.

At the first Hackers Conference in 1984, futurist Steve Brand famously said that “information wants to be free,” and the music industry that’s been shrink-wrapped from illegal downloading and file sharing can certainly attest to the Internet’s spendthrift tendencies.

Yet, the New York Times and other media choosing to charge for their premium online content bank on the other half of Brand’s quote that’s often forgotten: “… information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.”

Despite Internet users’ tendency to hop around having to pay for what it wants, they’re also willing to pull out their wallets when the content is worth it.

The big paywall question for print publications is whether their articles, slideshows and other features will make that cut.

A 2010 survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 65 percent of online consumers “paid to access or download” digital content, including music, software, apps and news content with the average person spending $10 per month.

Breaking down the stats isn’t necessarily encouraging for print organizations grappling to bridge the digital divide since only 18 percent reported paying for “digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports.”

With the Times charging $15 per month plus smartphone access, $20 for added iPad access and $35 for computer, smartphone and iPad, it’s clearly striking a premium price point – but one that publisher Arthur Sulzberger insists is necessary to boost revenue where traditional online advertising won’t pay the bills.

At the same time, other publications’ paywalls don’t all spell doom for the Times’ venture. The Wall Street Journal has charged for full article access since 1997 and hasn’t folded from traffic drops. Also, when Michigan’s Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era daily began charging $1.99 per month for online obituary access, site traffic actually increased.

But almost as soon at the Times paywall went live, techies were already figuring out ways to code and keystroke around the block. Linking to articles from Twitter, Facebook and Google also doesn’t count against the 20-article limit, so the paywall isn’t exactly an iron gate.

In that case, ethical quandaries of whether or not users should pay for Web content might become moot if everyone can eventually sneak inside anyway. Just ask the record business.

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