Items tagged with video
Los Angeles has a love affair with car chases on TV. But delivering traffic cam footage to your cell phone? That's the idea behind FreeTrafficCams.com, which has rolled out its product in a few cities across the country. From the list of their upcoming cities, they're definitely in the "expansion" mode.Starting Tuesday, people with the right phones can download the application, then click and pick from more than 270 cameras aimed at the city's streets and highways to view.By "right phones," by the way, we don't mean the iPhone. That version is coming this summer, 3rd Dimension spokesman Rob Manfredo said. Some of the cameras will show still pictures and update them often, while others will show...
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1080p HD Quality from the Super Bowl to the Lecture Hall: ATEN Technology Launches New HDMI Video Splitters and Switches Designed for Home and Business UseIRVINE, Calif., June 24 /PRNewswire/ -- ATEN Technology, Inc., an innovator of high-quality KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) and remote connectivity products to centrally manage servers, network devices and IT infrastructure, today introduced three new HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) video splitters and switches as part of its expanded line of audio/video products. Designed for the diverse needs of home theatre, corporate, educational, broadcast and commercial environments, these new products provide high definition video quality to multiple...
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EA has released a video preview of the "Cell Phase" of Spore--the hotly-anticipated brainchild of Sim's creator Will Wright. The video shows vivid samples of what a game player might experience when first starting out with a new creature in the first phase of the game, called the "Cell Phase" or "Tide Pool Phase." Spore is "an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space." The game is made up of five phases:Tide Pool PhaseFight with other creatures and consume them to adjust the form and abilities of your creature. It's survival of the fittest at the most...
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A common knock on the wildly popular Guitar Hero console gamer is that it's a shame that people don't just learn how to play the guitar instead. It's easier to play the actual guitar than many songs on Guitar Hero on its most challenging setting, after all. Perhaps the critics were wrong about Guitar Hero siphoning off interest in the actual instrument. Six of the top twenty iTunes podcasts are guitar tutorials by iVideosongs.When possible, iVideosongs gets guitarists who actually wrote popular songs to explain each riff in detail. At the very least, the instructors are professional guitarists with in-depth knowledge and a nice way of imparting it. The focus is on the guitar, but the site includes...
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YouTube may rule supreme in the melded world of online video and social networking, but Microsoft has a new trick up its sleeve that it hopes might steal some eyeballs away from the competition. Launching today in 20 countries and 12 languages is Microsoft's Messenger TV service, integrating online video directly into Microsoft's Live Messenger application. "Watching online video is no longer about one person in front of their computer, it's now a social experience. Users can now share a selection of free content and watch it at the same time as their friends through Messenger TV."Microsoft has partnered with a number of popular content providers, such as MTV, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, National...
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Gizmodo has posted a video clip sent in by a reader that supposedly shows a Psystar Mac Clone up and running in the home of an actual Psystar customer. "The thing boots up and runs pretty damn fast, says Patrick, but Software Update won't recognize it so you won't be able to patch. System Profiler thinks that it's a Mac Pro." The video is fairly convincing in that it appears actually to show the Mac OS running on non-Mac hardware. However, there is nothing that definitively identifies the machine as from Psystar. With the right hardware, resources, and patience, it's actually not terribly difficult to get the Mac OS to run on a non-Mac system, as many members of the OSx86 Project could tell...
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It has been a while since we’ve had anything to report on the Sony/Digital Video Distribution front, but it looks like it’s almost a reality.According to sources the long-awaited feature is nearly available. For their part Sony is, of course, keeping quiet. This could be due to negotiations or the fact that the service may not be quite ready from a technical and/or infrastructure standpoint."We don't have anything new to announce at this time," Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold said in an e-mail.But a Sony marketing executive said in a blog post last week that news could come soon."Ultimately the goal of the PlayStation Network service will be to break through the overwhelming clutter of digital...
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While it appears there certainly is an ad for this particular, er, subject, the question of how legitimate it is remains.In one of the more unbelievable media twists to come in the aftermath of last week’s Byron Review, a national newspaper is offering readers 'hundreds of pounds' to confess that games pushed them into a life of crime.An advert encouraging readers to ‘pitch’ their story to the newspaper has appeared on an 'online talent community’ – which promotes opportunities for aspiring actors and models to raise their profile.The Byron Review piece discussed above is about a piece in the UK paper The Review that said that Tanya Byron wanted laws changed so that retailers faced a stiffer...
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Call this a rumor, but a particularly cool one.Netflix may consider extending its Watch Instantly movie streaming feature to game consoles, says one customer presented with a survey by the company. Polling its subscriber base, the rental outlet asks households if they would like to watch both movies and TV shows through either the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360 and suggests a custom software implementation that would allow the feature.No confirmation yet, and only one report of this survey, which makes this report very questionable yet. It would indeed be a cool feature, however....
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It appears that Yahoo has other things on their agenda besides the potential takeover from Microsoft. What could be more important than billions of dollars? A new video service to help Yahoo catch up to arch rival Google's YouTube.Yahoo completed the takeover of Maven Networks on Tuesday for a tidy sum of $160 million.“The deal marks Yahoo's latest attempt to expand its online advertising network and snap out of a two-year financial funk that has culminated in unsolicited takeover offer from Microsoft Corp.”It will certainly be worth considering if Microsoft's Soapbox service can benefit from Yahoo's latest acquisition or if this purchase was made to make Yahoo seem less appealing....
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A rising tide lifted all the boats in the video gaming industry, and we all shot those boats with RPGs in our spare time. The industry reports $17.9 billion in sales for 2007, 43 percent higher than 2006. The Wii led the way in hardware, and Halo 3 sold an astonishing 4.82 million games. The industry set new highs in every category of hardware and software, says NPD analyst Anita Frazier. "Both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 realized strong hardware sales increases," Frazier says. "The 360 in particular seems to have benefitted from a killer slate … including Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed and Halo 3."Despite the Wii's success, it was only the top-selling console system. Nintendo's handheld DS actually...
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One of the more endearing paths to celebrity in the Online age has been the viral video. From the Numa Numa dance to Tron guy, we like to see quirky and obscure things rocket to the front of the line for Internet attention. It seems to appeal to our instincts to root for the little guy against the giant. There seems to be a problem developing in the process: It's faker than your average prOnstar's boobs.There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day (I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t care how “viral” you think your video is; no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it.The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients...
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Japan's Sony Corporation crawled up out of the puddle of reddish ink it was dog-paddling in last year and posted a substantial profit for the last quarter. The quarterly profit news allowed Sony to raise its forecast for the year by six times last year's number. The number is based mainly on strength in LCD TVs, computers, and digital cameras; and of course there were no flaming laptop battery recalls this year to eat away at the bottom line. But Sony is still unable to make any money selling its flagship Playstation 3 gaming console and Blu-ray player. ...its PlayStation 3 (PS3) videogame console continued to lag Nintendo Co Ltd's hot-selling Wii, and the game division fell deep into the...
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It hasn't been that long since the couple has reconciled, but it appears YouTube and Thailand may be on the splits again. The government is seeking a court order to block two video clips currently on YouTube. "In the next couple of days, we will seek a court order to block those links deemed to cause public confusion and threaten national security," Yanaphon Youngyuen, head of the Justice Ministry's Internet crimes unit, told Reuters. "While awaiting the court order, we are seeking cooperation from Internet service providers to block those links," he said. The two-part postings,...
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U.S. Disctrict Court Judge Robin J. Cauthron has issued a permanent injunction against an Oklahoma state law that, if it had ever gone into effect, would have prevented the sale of violent video games to minors.The law was signed last June by Governor Brad Henry, but a temporary injunction was invoked almost immediately to study whether or not the law was constitutional.“We need to move past unconstitutional attempts to circumvent Oklahoma citizens’ rights. This bill was clearly unconstitutional and we now need to develop a public/private partnership that meets concerned parents’ needs,” said Michael D. Gallagher, president of the ESA, which represents U.S. computer and video game publishers....
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For years the defense department and even some large corporations have utilized games as a method of teaching people various trade tasks. It appears that miners are perhaps the newest recipients of 'video game' based training.Considering the staggering cost of serious mining equipment (think 7 and 8 figures each), the idea of training and even employment pre-qualification on a virtual platform might make sense. It certainly seems that it makes sense to Caterpillar, who brought their video game 'simulation' to Peru this week for a mining convention. Apparently the new training method earned some new fans:“Giant video games with throaty diesel engines powering monster-sized earth movers, excavators...
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This law had originally passed in 2005, but late last year was temporarily blocked. The block became permanent in August of this year, when a judge ruled the law was unconstitutional. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday that he had appealed a court decision that struck down the controversial violent video game law in his state. The appeal was filed in federal court for the Northern District of California. The law would have prevented the sale or rental of "ultra-violent" video games to anyone under 18, and would have required clear labeling of such games. Schwarzenegger's appeal was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of...
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In this era of YouTube, as well as videos you can take from your cell phone, there's less and less real hope of privacy. In this case, someone turned a 5th grade graduation ceremony, which should be something to be treasured, into something disgusting. "The video was three and a half minutes of me. It would go to my face, to my butt, to my face," said former elementary school teacher Keri McIntyre. "And then he had his fun zooming in to my butt."McIntyre said she only recently learned of the video's existence and that it was posted on YouTube, set to the Van Halen tune "Hot for Teacher." Now, McIntyre is on a mission to find out who was behind the camera because she said someone turned...
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A number of Blogger users, ourselves included, have noticed a series of publishing and saving glitches on Blogger lately. There was even an outage this week, though that may have been the result of patches that Google performed to fix the issue. Additionally, on Friday, Google added direct video upload services to Blogger. An undetermined number of Blogger publishers had trouble performing various editing and posting operations on Monday and Tuesday, but by Wednesday the problem had been solved.After marking the eighth 'birthday' of this free blogging service on Thursday, Google announced the video upload feature on Friday. "This feature allows you to upload videos and create...
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It has been discussed often, yet there has been no definitive answer about whether or not video games contribute to societal violence. If you look around you can find studies that say "yes," and studies that say "no." Well, Oprah's favorite shrink, Dr. Phil, is going to tackle the issue, as he prepares to tape a show devoted to just that subject. GamePolitics has learned that the popular TV shrink is taping an episode about game violence on Thursday. Readers may recall that just one day after the Virginia Tech massacre, Dr. Phil made comments on the Larry King show which seemed to indicate a belief that violent games played a role in the killings. BTW, we are allowed to use the word "shrink"...
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Google has recently announced plans to employ advanced copyright protection technology to thwart unauthorized video posts on YouTube. The company expects to have the filtering software up and running by September. Beck assures us that Google’s new defensive software is as advanced as FBI fingerprinting technology. “The software will enable copyright holders to submit a digital fingerprint. This will be compared with any videos uploaded to YouTube, allowing attempts to upload copyright content to be quickly blocked.” The announcement was made by Philip Beck, a lawyer that is representing Google in a case initiated by English football’s Premier League and music publisher Bourne Co. The plaintiffs...
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68 million people played video games on a console last month, and an astonishing 42% spent that time playing on the last generation Sony console, the Playstation 2. Nintendo's Wii has garnered a lot of press for its explosive sales and fun, intuitive controller; but if you add sales of the Playstation 2 and Playstation 3, they add up to about the total number of Wiis sold last month. People won't stop buying and using Playstation 2s. The numbers suggest that older machines remain popular despite last November's high-profile debut of Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3, which had 4 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. Nintendo's GameCube ranked fourth with 5.8 percent....
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