SECTION 5

SECTION 5's focus is Next Level Filmed Entertainment. We're committed to pushing viewers beyond conventional story-telling and into a filmed experience using a multi-platform approach. The richness of the tech available to us now is unprecedented; Augmented Reality, touch-screen devices, audience engagement, etc. We are at a moment in Entertainment where all the rules have changed not only in the structure of our business, but in the delivery and architecture of the projects, themselves. SECTION 5 is also committed to pushing the boundaries creatively and exploring the Next Level of writing, directing, acting, cinematography, editing, etc. This is a remarkable pivot point for Filmed Entertainment.

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tanya77:

parislemon:

really-shit:

Imagine a world where your iPhone, car or any electronic device charges fully in 30 seconds to a minute. Well, that world has arrived. 

Scientists at UCLA have accidentally found the future of batteries and its very exciting. Watch this short little clip & be amazed.

Awesome. While everyone has been focusing on extending battery life, these guys may have alleviated the core problem from the other side. If you can charge your phone in a minute and have that charge last for hours, I’m sold.

Also, see: previous post.

This seems to be an oddly generic film short to be an entrant into a competition, but love the fantastic scientists and their work. Go Bruins! 

Mar 04

DRM is crushing indie booksellers online — paidContent

Emily and I wrote an article about DRM that I think you should read

(via ruthcurry)

The tech that needs to be developed is one that triggers a small payment (I’m talking 50c or so) when you download something from a P2P network. If 75% of what you watch online is watched via someone passing it around, ignoring that means you wish to capitalize on only 25% of your distribution potential.

That sounds like a crazy business model.

Feb 21

Publishers told us that if we did not have digital rights management (DRM) technology, they weren’t interested in letting us promote and sell their products. DRM is the set of technologies that encrypt and prevent the reproduction of e-book files. A new bricks and mortar bookstore, even the tiniest one, could have easily opened accounts with all the major distributors. But to sell electronic versions of those exact same books, publishers told us that you have to be a mega corporation. We were confused, and set about finding out why this counterintuitive business practice has taken root.

DRM is supposed to prevent piracy and illegal file sharing. In order to provide DRM, you need at least $10,000 up front to cover software, server, and administration fees, plus ongoing expenses associated with the software. In other words, much bigger operating expenses than a small business can afford. By requiring retailers to encrypt e-books with DRM, big publishers are essentially banning indie retailers from the online marketplace.

techspotlight:

TshirtOS: ‘Wearable, Shareable’ Computer Demoed On London’s Streets (VIDEO)

A t-shirt which allows the wearer to share their Facebook status, Tweets, photos and songs with anyone who walks past has been demoed on the streets of London.

‘T-Shirt OS’ is literally a wearable garment with its own operating system. It comes with a camera to take photos, a headphone jack to listen to iTunes tracks, and several other functions controlled via a mobile app. It has 1024 LED lights on a 32x32 grid, and can display a full range of colours.

The camera is an Omnivision Camera Cube, with a footprint of mere millimetres, and it also has a three-axis accelerometer, which can detect when the wearer jumps or moves at speed. It also includes Bluetooth, and its own circuit board and processors.

The t-shirt was previously shown online to wild acclaim, and in a new video is seen working for the first time around the streets of London. 

Aug 26
techspotlight:

TshirtOS: ‘Wearable, Shareable’ Computer Demoed On London’s Streets (VIDEO)
A t-shirt which allows the wearer to share their Facebook status, Tweets, photos and songs with anyone who walks past has been demoed on the streets of London.
‘T-Shirt OS’ is literally a wearable garment with its own operating system. It comes with a camera to take photos, a headphone jack to listen to iTunes tracks, and several other functions controlled via a mobile app. It has 1024 LED lights on a 32x32 grid, and can display a full range of colours.
The camera is an Omnivision Camera Cube, with a footprint of mere millimetres, and it also has a three-axis accelerometer, which can detect when the wearer jumps or moves at speed. It also includes Bluetooth, and its own circuit board and processors.
The t-shirt was previously shown online to wild acclaim, and in a new video is seen working for the first time around the streets of London. 

SECTION 5

Posted on Monday March 4th 2013 at 10:57pm. Its tags are listed below.

tanya77:

parislemon:

really-shit:

Imagine a world where your iPhone, car or any electronic device charges fully in 30 seconds to a minute. Well, that world has arrived. 

Scientists at UCLA have accidentally found the future of batteries and its very exciting. Watch this short little clip & be amazed.

Awesome. While everyone has been focusing on extending battery life, these guys may have alleviated the core problem from the other side. If you can charge your phone in a minute and have that charge last for hours, I’m sold.

Also, see: previous post.

This seems to be an oddly generic film short to be an entrant into a competition, but love the fantastic scientists and their work. Go Bruins! 

Publishers told us that if we did not have digital rights management (DRM) technology, they weren’t interested in letting us promote and sell their products. DRM is the set of technologies that encrypt and prevent the reproduction of e-book files. A new bricks and mortar bookstore, even the tiniest one, could have easily opened accounts with all the major distributors. But to sell electronic versions of those exact same books, publishers told us that you have to be a mega corporation. We were confused, and set about finding out why this counterintuitive business practice has taken root.

DRM is supposed to prevent piracy and illegal file sharing. In order to provide DRM, you need at least $10,000 up front to cover software, server, and administration fees, plus ongoing expenses associated with the software. In other words, much bigger operating expenses than a small business can afford. By requiring retailers to encrypt e-books with DRM, big publishers are essentially banning indie retailers from the online marketplace.

DRM is crushing indie booksellers online — paidContent

Emily and I wrote an article about DRM that I think you should read

(via ruthcurry)

The tech that needs to be developed is one that triggers a small payment (I’m talking 50c or so) when you download something from a P2P network. If 75% of what you watch online is watched via someone passing it around, ignoring that means you wish to capitalize on only 25% of your distribution potential.

That sounds like a crazy business model.

The Media World is Flat / Opinion / Contagious Magazine

christinebeardsell:

The last 50 years of disruptive advertising is slowly being killed off by technology and human behaviour. It’s starting to look like one of those cat and mouse shows where the joke is unfortunately always on the cat. Technologies like VOD are almost 15 years old in the UK.  That means a teenager could have lived their entire life without viewing a single commercial. Click-through rates on banner ads are on average 0.01% (not including fall-off rates); 99.99% of the world is suffering from Banner Blindness - with no foreseeable cure. And the latest plague on the industry is Google’s own war on SEO. The clever days of marketer’s back-linking and stuffing keywords seems to be a losing battle. The geekiest of interruptive methods are being out-geeked by the bigger geeks.

Sure makes the format of Brand Integration into scripted narrative that I was pitching 5 years ago a fairly obvious choice. If the Brand is a character in the project and the human characters in the resulting show have emotions/opinions about the Brand, the audience will consequently mirror them through their emotional involvement with the show. No matter the means by which the digital file made itself known online (Stop ignoring/vilanizing PEER-TO-PEER), the Brand’s presence would be intact.

Yeah, all the Brands who walked fairly far down the road with those projects, only to balk at the idea at the last minute, don’t look so smart now.

SECTION 5

Posted on Monday January 21st 2013 at 08:16am. Its tags are listed below.

Laboratory Equipment: Technology Enables Printed Holograph-Like Images

laboratoryequipment:

A cost-effective, sustainable solution for producing flexible film with no metal, extra lacquers or lamination has been introduced by Iscent, a Finnish start-up company based on technology from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The film surface modification technology enables the…

SECTION 5

Posted on Monday September 10th 2012 at 10:53am. Its tags are listed below.

theatlantic:

Why the Social Media Revolution Is About to Get a Little Less Awesome

Facebook, as a symbol of the attention economy, had already changed dramatically. Before the IPO, the company’s value was a debate. After the IPO, its value was a stock price. One side had said all along that no company had ever achieved Facebook’s scale, reach, and mastery of an audience’s time and attention without being worth $100 billion. Another side had said that no company such an undeveloped business model could possibly be worth even half that price. We don’t know who’s right in the long term, but in the short term the pessimists are winning[…]
Some of the smartest and most creative entrepreneurs and developers of our generation are dedicated to making awesome stuff for you, and, bankrolled by deep-pocketed venture capitalists, their determining business metric was not “How will you make money from credit cards and marketing departments?” but rather: How many millions of people are you delighting with your exceptionally cheap product? It is hard to imagine an industry built on a more satisfying premise for customers.

Read more. [Image: Telegraph]

Tumblr is mentioned in here, too. Investors want to know, “What’s the business model?”
You guys, CHARGE US FOR THE USE OF THESE PLATFORMS. How many users to you have, Tumblr? Over 6 Million? Charge us. Charge us $1 a month even. Let’s say you lose 3 Million users as a result (I don’t think you would), you would be generating THREE MILLION DOLLARS A MONTH.
Sure, the Internet would be aflame with indignation over being charged LESS THAN THE PRICE OF A PACK OF GUM per month to use a platform (take your pick) that has transformed how they connect with the world and how they express themselves to that world. They’ll get over it.
I think there’s a real terror among the Tech Community that to charge for your work is to invite intense dislike and rejection from not only users, but from others in the Tech Industry. You’ve got to buck that.
IMO, there’s a difference between the tech community’s open atmosphere (and its willingness to share that tech) and actually building a business and making a living. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Consider it a Time-Sensitive Freemium model. “You liked and used our platform for 4 years for free; now we need to charge you a minute amount of money.”
Start charging for your sites. Please. I willing to not see anymore fucking ads and I’m willing that all these platforms suceed in a really grand way, if for nothing less but that future platform-builders know that it’s more than OK to charge for something incredible that they’ve built.
This business model has worked for centuries and it can work now in social media.
theatlantic:

Why the Social Media Revolution Is About to Get a Little Less Awesome

Facebook, as a symbol of the attention economy, had already changed dramatically. Before the IPO, the company’s value was a debate. After the IPO, its value was a stock price. One side had said all along that no company had ever achieved Facebook’s scale, reach, and mastery of an audience’s time and attention without being worth $100 billion. Another side had said that no company such an undeveloped business model could possibly be worth even half that price. We don’t know who’s right in the long term, but in the short term the pessimists are winning[…]
Some of the smartest and most creative entrepreneurs and developers of our generation are dedicated to making awesome stuff for you, and, bankrolled by deep-pocketed venture capitalists, their determining business metric was not “How will you make money from credit cards and marketing departments?” but rather: How many millions of people are you delighting with your exceptionally cheap product? It is hard to imagine an industry built on a more satisfying premise for customers.

Read more. [Image: Telegraph]

Tumblr is mentioned in here, too. Investors want to know, “What’s the business model?”
You guys, CHARGE US FOR THE USE OF THESE PLATFORMS. How many users to you have, Tumblr? Over 6 Million? Charge us. Charge us $1 a month even. Let’s say you lose 3 Million users as a result (I don’t think you would), you would be generating THREE MILLION DOLLARS A MONTH.
Sure, the Internet would be aflame with indignation over being charged LESS THAN THE PRICE OF A PACK OF GUM per month to use a platform (take your pick) that has transformed how they connect with the world and how they express themselves to that world. They’ll get over it.
I think there’s a real terror among the Tech Community that to charge for your work is to invite intense dislike and rejection from not only users, but from others in the Tech Industry. You’ve got to buck that.
IMO, there’s a difference between the tech community’s open atmosphere (and its willingness to share that tech) and actually building a business and making a living. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Consider it a Time-Sensitive Freemium model. “You liked and used our platform for 4 years for free; now we need to charge you a minute amount of money.”
Start charging for your sites. Please. I willing to not see anymore fucking ads and I’m willing that all these platforms suceed in a really grand way, if for nothing less but that future platform-builders know that it’s more than OK to charge for something incredible that they’ve built.
This business model has worked for centuries and it can work now in social media.

theatlantic:

Why the Social Media Revolution Is About to Get a Little Less Awesome

Facebook, as a symbol of the attention economy, had already changed dramatically. Before the IPO, the company’s value was a debate. After the IPO, its value was a stock price. One side had said all along that no company had ever achieved Facebook’s scale, reach, and mastery of an audience’s time and attention without being worth $100 billion. Another side had said that no company such an undeveloped business model could possibly be worth even half that price. We don’t know who’s right in the long term, but in the short term the pessimists are winning[…]

Some of the smartest and most creative entrepreneurs and developers of our generation are dedicated to making awesome stuff for you, and, bankrolled by deep-pocketed venture capitalists, their determining business metric was not “How will you make money from credit cards and marketing departments?” but rather: How many millions of people are you delighting with your exceptionally cheap product? It is hard to imagine an industry built on a more satisfying premise for customers.

Read more. [Image: Telegraph]

Tumblr is mentioned in here, too. Investors want to know, “What’s the business model?”

You guys, CHARGE US FOR THE USE OF THESE PLATFORMS. How many users to you have, Tumblr? Over 6 Million? Charge us. Charge us $1 a month even. Let’s say you lose 3 Million users as a result (I don’t think you would), you would be generating THREE MILLION DOLLARS A MONTH.

Sure, the Internet would be aflame with indignation over being charged LESS THAN THE PRICE OF A PACK OF GUM per month to use a platform (take your pick) that has transformed how they connect with the world and how they express themselves to that world. They’ll get over it.

I think there’s a real terror among the Tech Community that to charge for your work is to invite intense dislike and rejection from not only users, but from others in the Tech Industry. You’ve got to buck that.

IMO, there’s a difference between the tech community’s open atmosphere (and its willingness to share that tech) and actually building a business and making a living. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Consider it a Time-Sensitive Freemium model. “You liked and used our platform for 4 years for free; now we need to charge you a minute amount of money.”

Start charging for your sites. Please. I willing to not see anymore fucking ads and I’m willing that all these platforms suceed in a really grand way, if for nothing less but that future platform-builders know that it’s more than OK to charge for something incredible that they’ve built.

This business model has worked for centuries and it can work now in social media.

SECTION 5

Posted on Friday September 7th 2012 at 12:33pm. Its tags are listed below.

With $1.9 Million In Funding, Dekko Aims To Be The Platform On Which Good Augmented Reality Is Built | TechCrunch

spytap:

I honestly cannot accurately quantify how exciting this is to me. Dekko looks even better than PTAM.

HBO Goes Cable-Free ...In The Nordic Region

parislemon:

Andrew Wallenstein:

HBO will make the Nordic region the first market where its programming will be available to consumers without requiring that they have a pay-TV subscription. 

For less than 10 euros a month, those in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark can get all the HBO content they desire without having to pay a crazy additional amount for a bunch of other content they don’t want — as we must do in the U.S. with the current cable television system.

HBO is quick to distance themselves from this being the new model they’re looking towards worldwide:

An HBO spokesman made clear that this launch does not reflect a strategic change for the company in any of its current markets. “Each market is unique and HBO approaches each one with what we consider to believe the best business model specific to that territory.”

Read: we still love you and your revenue, big cable!

But if this Nordic endeavor is extremely successful, maybe it does make HBO at least consider budging on their old school stance. I see this don’t-call-it-an-experiment as a very good sign.

The Vikings always get everything first.

My friend is a telcom analyst at Credit Suisse and a while ago he presented HBO with a thorough report that showed that if they went this route they would not only make as much money as they now do, but that they would make more. I suppose there are a lot of details of which I’m unaware about changing a large cable TV’s entire distribution, but it does sound like the reluctance is more due to having to make the effort to change it rather than to there being any (negative) impact to the bottomline.

SECTION 5

Posted on Sunday August 26th 2012 at 08:41am. Its tags are listed below.

techspotlight:

TshirtOS: ‘Wearable, Shareable’ Computer Demoed On London’s Streets (VIDEO)
A t-shirt which allows the wearer to share their Facebook status, Tweets, photos and songs with anyone who walks past has been demoed on the streets of London.
‘T-Shirt OS’ is literally a wearable garment with its own operating system. It comes with a camera to take photos, a headphone jack to listen to iTunes tracks, and several other functions controlled via a mobile app. It has 1024 LED lights on a 32x32 grid, and can display a full range of colours.
The camera is an Omnivision Camera Cube, with a footprint of mere millimetres, and it also has a three-axis accelerometer, which can detect when the wearer jumps or moves at speed. It also includes Bluetooth, and its own circuit board and processors.
The t-shirt was previously shown online to wild acclaim, and in a new video is seen working for the first time around the streets of London. 

techspotlight:

TshirtOS: ‘Wearable, Shareable’ Computer Demoed On London’s Streets (VIDEO)

A t-shirt which allows the wearer to share their Facebook status, Tweets, photos and songs with anyone who walks past has been demoed on the streets of London.

‘T-Shirt OS’ is literally a wearable garment with its own operating system. It comes with a camera to take photos, a headphone jack to listen to iTunes tracks, and several other functions controlled via a mobile app. It has 1024 LED lights on a 32x32 grid, and can display a full range of colours.

The camera is an Omnivision Camera Cube, with a footprint of mere millimetres, and it also has a three-axis accelerometer, which can detect when the wearer jumps or moves at speed. It also includes Bluetooth, and its own circuit board and processors.

The t-shirt was previously shown online to wild acclaim, and in a new video is seen working for the first time around the streets of London.