New Florence. New Renaissance.

Say hello to the KC-46A Pegasus Tanker

Boeing’s (heavily) modified 767 will gradually replace the aging (some are 60 years old) KC-135 Stratotankers. Foxtrot Alpha has details on some of the newer refueling  and other technologies in the tanker

“The KC-46A will feature innovative new technologies and capabilities. A three-point hose and drogue refueling system will be standard along with a fly-by-wire refueling boom. Omitted from the KC-46A design is the traditional 'boom pod' with its bay window and line-of-sight boom control station. Instead, the KC-46A will use a 3D video system fed to a refueling console for boom control.

The Pegasus will be equipped with a modern radar warning receiver and defensive countermeasure systems, along with a full glass cockpit and an advanced navigation system to comply with international standards. When it comes to lugging cargo around, the KC-46A far exceeds the KC-135 in every respect, with 18 palets being carried on a single mission. The Pegasus will also be more economical to operate considering the enhanced capability it provides over the Stratotanker. Other goodies include night-vision compatible lighting and future multi-mission capabilities via in the installation of plug-and-play consoles.”

Dolby Theatre gets a tech upgrade

When viewers tune into the Academy Awards Sunday, they can be forgiven for thinking the swelling music is coming from an orchestra hidden somewhere inside the 3,400-seat Dolby Theatre. The truth is a little less glamorous - they are a mile away, playing live at Capitol Records.

The sound is then piped through fiber optic cables back to the theater - in only 2.7 milliseconds.

"We just keep trying to get that latency down as close to zero, so that performers can hear exactly what the orchestra's doing and the orchestra can respond,"

CBS News

Photo Credit

Video Synopsis

The FBI started investigating while first responders were still rushing to the scene. Within three days -- just 101 hours -- the bombers were apprehended.

FBI agents sifted through 13,000 videos and more than 120,000 photographs, drawn from surveillance cameras and onlookers' cell phones. To sort through the piles of footage, law enforcement turned to new technology that can condense an hour of video into just a minute of playback time.

The method, called video synopsis, was invented by an Israeli company called BriefCam, which counts all the right three-letter agencies as clients. (The FBI declined to comment on the specifics of the Boston investigation.)

Video synopsis works in a variety of ways, but most programs layer actions that occur at the same place at different times, making it possible, for example, to see simultaneously every person who walks in a door on a given afternoon. Other notable inquiries have also used BriefCam, like Norway's national security service after Anders Breivik bombed a children's camp there in 2011.

Popular Science

 

Technology at the CNN Newsroom

So, at the Microsoft conference in Atlanta my wife and I took a tour of the CNN studio here. I wanted to see John King’s Magic Wall – Microsoft now owns Perceptive Pixel which provided that technology.  There’s Necco Ceresani, our guide using an older CNN model.

We also got to ride an escalator right up to the 8th floor – beats by a long shot one in the underground train in Prague which seemed to go on for ever.

We saw the extremely elaborate and expensive jibs,cranes and cameras in Studio 7

We watched the hive of activity which is the news room, where over a thousand stories are evaluated each day and breaking news worthy ones can move from this room to our screens in as little as 5 minutes

Finally, Margaret got to audition as an anchor – a bit soft spoken but glad it was a story about Apple, a company she has come to know very well with her new MacBook Pro.

 

A Jumbotron to display your mobile video

At a sporting event, CrowdOptic taps into cameras on smartphones and Google Glass and sifts through feeds to find action footage taken by fans for display on Jumbotrons or other media.

BusinessWeek

Google as your movie/photo editor

Google+ will pull clips from your video files that you select, stitch them together, and soundtrack the whole thing. You can choose the accompanying music, although it would be funny to let Google run wild and soundtrack your road-trip to a somber brass band or a funeral to techno.

If you're not an Android user, though, Google is also releasing a couple other new features for iOS. One, called Eraser, lets you remove objects from a photo by taking parts of multiple photos. For example: Just want to the photo in a crowd to be of you and your friend standing in the middle? Take three photos, and Eraser can remove the other people in the shot. There's also Action, which lets you take multiple images of someone, say, doing ballet, then lets you stich them together for a GIF-style effect.

Popular Science

Photo Credit of Auto Awesome feature Google announced at I/O earlier this year

The $ 6 million man, er home theater

Electronic House

“This room gets to 132dB. Think of it like this, a jack hammer is about 120 dB, and a Boeing 747 (yes, the airplane) is 140dB. The Kipnis theater falls in between that.”

“His cinema space has been recognized by the Guiness (sic) people six times so far, and there’s little chance of anyone taking his crown away, considering this home theater, which is always a work in progress, has cost him about $6 million. But cinema is an obsession for him, not to mention a business. He runs Kipnis Studio Standard, which designs and installs high-end home theaters, though none quite as elaborate as his own, which is part home theater, part laboratory. Here he tries out new equipment and new concepts, and is always a little ahead of the curve.”

The article also has a photo gallery including one of the “IMAX at home”

Magazine Renaissance

It is a truism that the march of technology has killed Main Street media.

Well, the New Florence blog has chuckled at that comment for years now as it has benefited from my monthly trip to the magazine section at Barnes and Noble. Such a wide range of technologies covered across the publications. This summer for the book project, I interviewed the CEO of Burda, the German publishing house. He described how with business model and staffing changes many of his properties had survived the digital transition.

Larry Dignan of ZDNet was telling me how the iPad (and other tablets) has allowed several publications to be reinvented. The amazing color saturation, the interactive graphics, the embedded videos are all making the reading experience so much more enjoyable. Indeed, many of the graphs on New Florence these days come from my subscriptions on the iPad – the one above of Miami smoke art from Time, and below of the Hermes clock from a supplement in Wired.

So, I am tempted to sign up to NextIssue – it promises unlimited and archive access to 122 well known magazines for $ 14.99 a month. My only hesitation is it will make me think about cutting back those B&N trips.

Video as a B2B marketing tool

Nice post by Jon Reed on video v text marketing even in B2B settings with pro and con points like “75% of executives watch videos and 50% share videos with their colleagues” and “video doesn’t always display properly on all devices”.

Jon, along with Dennis Howlett whose video blogging technique and technology I wrote about here, are clear pioneers in making video more mainstream in B2B settings. My only concern – vendors will continue to just focus on their products even in retina display settings!

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.