Video – Neil Gaiman on Copyright Piracy

“My God, it’s full of stars!”

Plains Milky Way from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

Dynamic Perception Stage Zero Dolly dynamicperception.com

During the month of May, I shot Milky Way timelapse in central South Dakota, when I had the time, and the weather cooperated. The biggest challhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifenge was cloudy nights and the wind. There were very few nights, when I could shoot, that were perfectly clear, and often the wind was blowing 25mph +. That made it hard to get the shots I wanted. I kept most of the shots low to the ground, so the wind wouldn't catch the setup and cause camera shake, or blow it over. I used a Stage Zero Dolly on the dolly shots and a "Milapse" mount on the panning ones.

Canon 60D and T2i
Tokina 11-16
Sigma 20mm F1.8
Tamron 17-50

Keen On… Suzanne Vega: Music, Like Oranges, Shouldn’t Be Given Away for Free (TCTV)

Question: Who is the mother of MP3?

Answer: Singer songwriter Suzanne Vega, whose iconic 1981 song “Tom’s Diner” was used by MP3 inventor Karl-Heinz Brandenberg to calibrate the standard of the revolutionary codec that would change the music industry forever.

Vega’s attitude to the music industry is pretty matrimonial too. On Wednesday, she keynoted the “CREATE: Protecting Creativity from the Ground Up” conference in Washington DC, put on by the technology and media coalition Arts and Labs (for whom, full disclosure, I consult). Not only did Vega play us an haunting intimate version of “Tom’s Diner”, but she also spoke uncompromising in favor of the artist’s right to be paid for his or her work. Arguing that if she wasn’t paid for her songs she would have to go back to being a receptionist, Vega argued that music, like oranges, shouldn’t be given away for free.

Whatever else one might say about Vega’s critique of free culture and piracy, she can’t be accused of being a Luddite. As she confessed to me when I caught her on camera after her CREATE speech, she is a big fan of Twitter and particularly Facebook where she goes “eight or nine times a day”. Nor does she defend the status-quo of the old record industry. “The audience is the most important thing”, she explained the new reality of the business, telling young musicians that it’s much more important to build a loyal following than get a record deal.

Her faith in today’s digital technology to build viable new business models was echoed by a number of other speakers at CREATE. On a panel about the future of the digital economy that I moderated, for example, all the panelists agreed that the digital economy provided exciting opportunities for all creative industries in the 21st century. From Mike Fricklas, Viacom’s General Counsel to Matt Serletic, CEO of Music Mastermind to Jim Cavanagh, President of the American Society of Media Photographers to Tom Adams, Rosetta Stone CEO, everyone agreed that new streaming and anti-piracy technologies and devices offered incredibly exciting opportunities for media entrepreneurs. But, like Suzanne Vega, too, all the speakers on my panel agreed that digital content, like analog oranges, couldn’t and shouldn’t be given away for free.

Make-o Lego

Nazi Germany’s Secret Army of Flying Beetles: The Volkswaffe!

Google Scaling Solar, Commits $280 Million To Finance SolarCity Installations

Google today announced a new partnership with SolarCity, committing $280 million from its coffers to finance SolarCity installations, namely solar rooftops for homes in North America.

Google Doodle

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http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html#tune=IAR1xrg0PodcODaAAAdYuxUy5nSNgA**

Conan O’Brien’s Dartmouth Commencement Speech

Walt Talks About iCloud With Charlie Rose

This week, post-WWDC keynote, Charlie Rose sat Walt down to discuss the implications and impact of Steve Jobs’s iCloud announcement, and of cloud computing in general. In clip one, Walt lays out cloud computing basics. In clip two, Rose asks Walt about Jobs’s vision of the “post-PC” era.

Twenty Feet lets you know more about your social media stats

I love Twenty Feet. Every morning it sends me an email and lets me know if something weird happened in my stats for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other places. For instance, did more of my videos get favorited than usual? Did more people subscribe or unsubscribe than usual?

Here CEO Martin Seibert explains more behind what TwentyFeet does and shows off a preview of a new iPhone app coming soon.

Twimbow brings color to social media

Twimbow looks a bit like TweetDeck, but look again and you'll see a colorfully different approach! By using colors you can uncover tweets and status messages from people and brands you care about. Here Luca Filigheddu, CEO of Twimbo, shows me what it does and what his philosophy is behind social media clients.

Apple to Lodsys: Now, Youse Can’t Leave

Apple to Lodsys: Now, Youse Can’t Leave
JUNE 10, 2011 AT 1:00 PM PT



Lodsys has really stepped in it now.
Apple has filed a motion to intervene in the patent infringement lawsuits that the patent holding company has brought against seven iOS developers, a move that could add significant legal heft to their defense.
Filed in the Eastern District of Texas, the motion explains that developers who’ve been targeted by Lodsys “are individuals or small entities with far fewer resources than Apple and … lack the technical information, ability, and incentive to adequately protect Apple’s rights under its license agreement.”
So Apple would like to intervene on their behalf.
“While the Developers will likely be interested in resolving this case as quickly and inexpensively as possible, Apple’s interest is in protecting its broader license rights with respect to thousands of App developers for Apple products who may be the subject of future Lodsys lawsuits or threats.”
In other words, Lodsys, which has been harassing independent developers who lack the means to fend off its litigation, may soon find itself grappling with Apple legal, which is an ugly, ugly proposition indeed.
The situation reminds me of a scene midway through “A Bronx Tale” in which a group of bikers disrespect a local Mafia don’s bar (video below). When asked to leave, they refuse. The don walks over to the door, locks it — trapping the bikers inside, turns to them and says, “Now, youse can’t leave.” A group of heavies emerges from the back of the bar and beats the bikers senseless, while this narration runs in the background.
“I will never forget the look on their faces. All eight of them. Their faces dropped. All their courage and strength was drained right from their bodies. They had a reputation for breaking up bars, but they knew that instant, they’d made a fatal mistake. This time they walked into the wrong bar.”
If the court grants Apple’s motion to intervene, Lodsys may have just done the same.

Big Live: fostering real-time interactions around content

Producers of online video content are always looking for ways to get their audience more involved and more engaged beyond just leaving comments. By leveraging the social network, Big Live is providing a solution that fosters real-time discussion among audiences.

"Big Live is a synchronous video platform," explains Jonathan Zakin, President, CEO & Co-Founder of Big Live. "It's a social network built around the idea of sharing experience around viewing content that you enjoy with other people. We've looked out there at the other video platforms that have basically a chat room next to a player, and they approach that problem through the player side. We approached it through the social networking side. We built a social network around that, and so as a result, you have a very immersive social experience around this content."

Big Live recently released a widget that allows content providers to embed the app into other sites or their own site using an iframe. Users can still view the content anonymously, but you must log in using Facebook Connect in order to socially interact. Once you have logged in, you can see everyone else that is also viewing that content simultaneously, you can roll your mouse over the audience and see the profile of individual audience members, and you can sort the audience members based on several criteria.

"You can sort on age, location and gender and whether or not they are Facebook friends of yours," says Zakin. "Once you do that, you can begin to interact with them in real time around that synchronous video experience either through group chat or through a one-on-one chat, so if you find somebody in the crowd that you're interested in talking to, you can take them offline and chat with them that way. We're trying to emulate going to an event, turning to the person next to you and saying, 'Hey, this is very cool.'"

MovieClips Raises $6M To Curate And Mashup Scenes From Movies

Online movie clips site Movieclips.com has raised $6 million out of a $7 million round, according to a recent SEC filing. The startup has previously raised $3 million. We’ve confirmed the new funding with the company.

Movieclips.com, which launched in 2009, offers a clip engine with over 14,000 different clips from 1,400 titles from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. Last year, the startup also launched a new product, called Movieclips Mashups, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, which allows anyone to make montages of two minutes clips.

Along with the studio partnerships (which is half the battle for licensing movie content), the company has also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to every scene, making it super easy to find scenes by actor, film title, dialogue snippet, mood, director, genre, etc.

The site also launched a specialized video player and features an API developers can use to integrate Movieclips on other sites; AOL’s Moviefone actually uses the technology on its platform.

Google vs Apple: The Cool Factor [Video]

http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html





Earlier today I was invited to do a quick guest spot on CNBC’s Power Lunch, where we discussed a question that’s fundamentally important to the future of Silicon Valley: Who is cooler, Google or Apple?

Okay, so the topic was a bit goofy. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it: after all, public perception can play a role in how quickly products from each company get picked up by new users, which in turn can impact their bottom lines.

Tune in to hear my thoughts. Because if there’s a guy who knows cool, it’s me. Oh, and there’s an interview with the folks who made the awesome Les Paul Google Doodle gracing the search engine’s home page today. You can watch that one here:

Google Earth, Columbia University Map Seafloor Area Bigger Than North America

Thursday marked World Oceans Day, a United Nations effort to “raise global awareness of the challenges faced by the international community in connection with the oceans.”

「兩岸皆中國軍」 退將登陸失言？

現在的兩岸關係，既不是敵人，也不是朋友，經濟、觀光、甚至血緣都密不可分，可是一扯到主權和尊嚴，馬上你是你、我是我，今天退役將領是否赴陸失言這個話題，再一次牽動了這條敏感的神經，編輯台時間邀請到聯合報大陸中心記者陳東旭來探究。

恐龍法官多 凸顯社會觀感差？

宜蘭法官違失案以及大法官資格審查這兩件事，讓民眾對司法改革的期待再次浮上檯面，「編輯台時間」邀請聯合報資深立法院記者楊湘鈞，來談最新的司法議題。

About : Expeditionary Learning

Expeditionary Learning from Expeditionary Learning on Vimeo.

Over the course of our 17-year history, we have grown from a small adventurous group of ten schools into a network the size of a substantial urban school district.

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