New Florence. New Renaissance.

Migrating Old Home Movies to the Cloud

"Surrounded by chip companies and Web startups, YesVideo’s 25,000-square-foot Santa Clara production facility sticks out. It hums with the staccato rhythms of old movie projectors and slide carousels. There’s dedicated floor space for VHS, Betamax, 16mm, and Super 8 film, and even standard 8mm film, a format invented in the 1930s. One room is devoted to photo albums, with each page digitized using a high-resolution camera. In another, used to convert slides, YesVideo engineers have cut holes in the sides of a half-dozen vintage Kodak Carousel projectors and inserted Nikon D10 digital cameras to directly capture each slide. The company buys many of its retro players and replacement parts on EBay. “You won’t be able to recreate this business in about three years” because there won’t be enough working equipment, says YesVideo engineer Rolf Breuer."

BusinessWeek

Technology in the Boston chase

Beyond the rifles and the flash-bang grenades, there was plenty of other technology in the chase for the Tsarnaev brothers.

• The owner of the Mercedes SUV that was carjacked in Cambridge had his mobile phone on (and he left it in the car after he was allowed to escape). This allowed the police to trace the vehicle was in Watertown and eventually catch up to it.
• FLIR — forward-looking infrared – was used to get a thermal heat map of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as he cowered in the boat where he was eventually captured (photo below)
• Robots were used to examine the abandoned car of the suspect and in lifting the tarp off the boat.
• The Boston Police, Fire, EMS live feed was one of the most  popular “radio stations” during the crisis (it was turned off at various points to not compromise operational details)
• Not a common sight in most cities, but the chase brought out SWAT team Humvees and Blackhawk helicopters.

Earlier in the week I had profiled video processing and analytical technology used in reviewing the mountains of evidence

Photo Credit

Processing Massive Amount of Crime Video

Wonder how the investigators in the Boston bombing are reviewing countless store, building, police and citizen provided videos?

Likely using technology and process the LEVA Forensic Video Analysis Response Team used to process over 5000 hours of video evidence related to the June 15, 2011 Stanley Cup Riot in Vancouver.

The review and tagging is a painstaking process. 52 analysts then spent 14 days processing that footage, identifying 15,000 criminal acts perpetrated by 300 rioters.

 

A transcript of St. Augustine, FL as it was

"Inside a Catholic convent deep in St. Augustine's historic district, stacks of centuries-old, sepia-toned papers offer clues to what life was like for early residents of the nation's oldest permanently occupied city.

These parish documents date back to 1594, and they record the births, deaths, marriages and baptisms of the people who lived in St. Augustine from that time through the mid-1700s. They're the earliest written documents from any region of the United States, according to J. Michael Francis, a history professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Francis and some of his graduate students in the Florida Studies department have spent the past several months digitizing the more than 6,000 fragile pages to ensure the contents last beyond the paper's deterioration."

Yahoo News

Photo Credit National Park Service of Castillo de San Marcos whose construction started in 1672

Home theater with small room and budget

A 12x18 room, and a budget of $13,000 including installation and theater seats...from Electronic House

Dohman suggested a suit of Jamo D600 speakers mounted on the front wall with additional Jamo surrounds on the sides. Powering the speakers is a Pioneer Elite SC-61 7.1 receiver which offers 125 watts per channel. Because the receiver features both AirPlay and Bluetooth, the users have no trouble connecting their smartphones for music listening. A cable DVR and Sony Blu-ray player feed video into the room. All the components are housed on a component rack in the back of the room. The 12-foot wide wall is mostly taken up with a 112-inch 16:9 Severtson screen that gets lit up by a JVC DLA-X35 projector

Making eBooks interactive

Inkling, started by Matt MacInnis, a former marketing manager at Apple, gives publishers a way to digitize and upgrade some of their highest-margin books without creating an app for each title. The San Francisco-based startup’s new Habitat software platform, released on Feb. 12 after a private beta test, allows publishers to add high-resolution photos, audible pronunciations of wine varietals, or videos that show how to cut an avocado. “Inkling is going at a unique, high-end interactive experience that you won’t find on many of those other platforms,” says Jerome Grant, chief learning officer for the education division at Pearson, an Inkling investor.

The company has teamed up with publishers including Pearson, McGraw-Hill (MHP), and Wolters Kluwer to try to gain ground in the U.S. e-book market, which Forrester Research (FORR) projects will reach $13.6 billion by 2017. Inkling will take a royalty of at least 30 percent from every sale.

Inkling is focused on textbooks, how-to guides, and cookbooks rather than novels. “We’re not interested in pumping a bunch of text files into our platform,” MacInnis says. Consumers can buy Inkling books on the Google search results page (through Inkling’s payment platform), from Inkling’s website, or from another publisher’s online store. The books are readable through the Inkling app on the iPad, iPhone, and computers. On Android devices, users have to access the books through the Web browser.

BusinessWeek

Photo Credit of an Inkling book Global History of Architecture

Next-Gen Digital Signage in Retail

For some retail customers, ADFLOW is working on interactive displays that engage consumers by identifying their mobile phones via technologies like NFC (near field communications) and location-based services, enabling highly targeted messaging and access to customer-specific promotions and loyalty data. An equally exciting opportunity to narrowcast content to specific demographic groups is found in facial recognition technology. “Without exception, retailers seek to recognize when a specific demographic profile of a consumer is in the store and customize the messaging accordingly,” explains Davies. “A wireless device retailer, for instance, wants to show under-30 females a very different set of products and services than it would promote to an over-50 male. Facial recognition allows this, and while we don’t think the market is quite ready for it today, it’s coming.” Another means of enabling one-to-one interaction with consumers that’s here now is through screens that interact not with specific people, but with specific products. For example, one ADFLOW customer sells electric drills ranging in price from $79.00 to $179.00, and the retailer needs an efficient means of communicating the features that create this price disparity. “We developed an interactive kiosk that enables product feature comparisons when specific items are picked up off the shelves; when the product is picked up, the signage launches content specific to that product. It’s also a popular concept for electronics and wireless device retailers.

Business Solutions Magazine

Photo Credit

4K is coming home

If you have seen a Sony 4K movie especially in a front row of a theater you may have not noticed the pixels beak down as you do with most other movies which show today in roughly 2,000 pixel format.

The ultra-high def is coming to your home theater

“Reuters says that Japan is getting ready to do TV in UHD. In fact, they’re planning the world’s first 4K TV broadcast for July 2014, in time for the World Cup. It may seem far away, but if all goes well, that target date will actually be two years ahead of schedule. The government hopes that the push will hope to drive demand of these new (and sort of pricey) sets.

Verizon FiOS is also throwing its name out there as a possibility. While U.S. broadcasters have yet to announce UHD TV plans, Version says that its high bandwidth, fiber-to-the-home connection is already ready to carry those signals without any sort of upgrade.

It’s certainly going to take time, but the wheels are definitely in motion. That’s OK, though; it will give you a little time to save up for one of those pretty 4K sets. Currently, the average price of a big-screen UHD TV is somewhere around $20,000”

Electronic House

Photo Credit AMC Theatres

Tech event backstage passes

I enjoyed reading about David Deal’s Oscars Backstage Pass and wondered why more tech industry events do not similarly show execs, partners, customers preparing for, reacting to presentations, being interviewed by bloggers and media, on the shuttle bus to the event, waiting for the rock concert event to start. Honestly, that is what makes physically going to an event worthwhile, and where webcasts and other virtual options fall short today.

Many vendors would likely be cautious about broadcasting non-scripted content but I can see friends like Dennis Howlett, Jon Reed, David Vallente who conduct video interviews at events maybe looking at similar “backstage passes”

 

Geeks at the Oscars

On February 9,  the Academy pre-honored 9 Scientific and Technical achievements :

• Pose Space Deformation technique used in computer-generated characters
• Light system for computer graphics lighting at PDI/DreamWorks.
• Katana computer graphics scene management and lighting software at Sony Pictures Imageworks
• Wavelet Turbulence software for simulation of gases and fluids
• Matthews Max Menace Arm which allows for precise positioning of fixtures and cameras
• Tissue Physically–Based Character Simulation Framework
• Mocha planar tracking and rotoscoping software at Imagineer Systems Ltd
• CINE VCLX Portable Power System
• Cooke Optics for advanced camera lenses

Don’t expect these geeks to be too prominent on the telecast Sunday:)

I plan to cheer when the short video about these awards runs during the broadcast.