Hello, Future: Moby Invites You to Create Your Video for a Track from New Album 'Destroyed'

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"The Brief

This year, as part of The Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Saatchi & Saatchi partners with Vimeo and Moby to discover yet another unique filmmaking talent, with a Music Video Challenge.

The brief is simple: interpret and bring to life the idea of 'Hello, Future' in the form of a fantastic music video for one of Moby's tracks from his new album, 'Destroyed'.

The winner will be announced and their video screened at this year's New Directors' Showcase in Cannes, as well as on the Vimeo site.

Historically, many featured directors in the Showcase have gone on to seriously successful careers: Tarsem, Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek, Spike Jonze, Ivan Zacharias, Kinka Usher, Danny Kleinman and Jonathan Glazer included.

No pressure...."

Wow. Kudos to these Grad Students: Ecosystem Geographers Predict Bin Laden's Hideout - Politics - GOOD

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This is fascinating. Excerpt from full article:

"Two years ago, a class of UCLA undergrads pretty accurately predicted the the location where Osama Bin Laden was hiding out. The students, working under UCLA geography professors Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew, used geographical theories and GIS software to home in on the world's most wanted fugitive.

Science Insider explains:

According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 89.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in a city less than 300 km from his last known location in Tora Bora: a region that included Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night.

On top of this, they identified 26 "city islands" that they considered to be the highest probability hideouts. To be clear: the class identified the nearby city of Parachinar as being the most likely hideout.

Here's the kicker. Gillespie focus isn't national security or terrorism or intelligence or any sort of political geography. He works on ecosystems...."

http://www.good.is/post/ecosystem-geographers-predict-bin-laden-s-hideout/

Very Cool: PBS plays Google’s word game, transcribing thousands of hours of video into crawler-friendly text » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

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From Niemanlab.org:

"Blogs and newspaper sites enjoy a built-in advantage when it comes to search-engine optimization. They deal in words. But a whole universe of audio and video content is practically invisible to Google.

Say I want to do research on Osama bin Laden. A web search would return news articles about his assassination, a flurry of tweets, the Wikipedia page, Michael Scheuer’s biography, and an old Frontline documentary, “Hunting Bin Laden.” I might then take my search to Lexis Nexis and academic journals. But I would never find, for example, Frontline’s recent reporting on the Egyptian revolution, where bin Laden makes an appearance, or any number of other video stories in which the name is mentioned.

While video and audio transcripts are rich for Google mining, they’re also time-consuming and expensive. PBS is out to fix that by building a better search engine. The network has transcribed and tagged, automatically, more than 2,000 hours of video using software called MediaCloud.

“Video is now more Google-friendly,” said Jon Brendsel, the network’s vice president of product development. Normally, automatic transcription is laughably bad — Google Voice users know this — but Brendsel is satisfied with the results of PBS’ transcription efforts. He said the accuracy rate is about 80 to 90 percent. That’s “much better than the quality that I normally attribute to closed captioning,” he said. The software can get away with mistakes because the transcripts are being read by computers, not people. (For a hefty fee, the content-optimization platform RAMP will put its humans to work to review and refine the auto-generated transcripts.)..."

Makes Perfect Sense: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: In Ten Years, “We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home”

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Excerpt from Erick Schonfeld's original post on techcrunch.com

"Netflix is blowing the doors off its business, with $3 billion in annualized revenue and a $12 billion market cap driven by the transition to streaming online video. In terms of hours watched, streaming surpassed DVDs for Netflix in the fourth quarter, but CEO Reed Hastings has been preparing for this moment for more than decade. The name Netflix itself always held the promise of movies delivered over the Internet. The problem, says Hastings in an interview today at the Wired business conference, was that back then they couldn’t stream movies over 56K modems.

But there was Moore’s Law and improvements in bandwidth which could be plotted, and that is exactly what Hastings did. “We took out our spreadsheets and we figured we’d get 14 megabits/sec to the home by 2012, which turns out is about what we will get.” So what does his spreadsheet tell him about the next ten years? “If you drag it out to 2021, we will all have a gigabit to the home.”...

Huge: Brightcove Awarded Patent For Digital Content Delivery: Online Video News « From Gigaom.com

Brightcove announced Monday that it has been granted its first U.S. patent, covering the publishing and distribution of digital media online. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded U.S. Patent Number 7,925,973 to Brightcove, giving some backing to the online video distribution firm’s intellectual property.

The patent application was originally filed way back in August 2005, around the same time that Brightcove was born. Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire, as well as founder and CTO Bob Mason, are both named as inventors of the patent in question. It claims ownership over intellectual property related to digital media distribution, including styleable player experiences, rights management, affiliate syndication, advertising policies and analytics, according to Brightcove.

There are three primary claims that the patent covers: The first is for a method of defining a style through which digital content can be delivered, like for example a video player. This ensures that the presentation method is stored on a server and separates the presentation of a piece of digital media from the media itself. The second claim revolves around digital rights to view a certain piece of content and ensuring that a user has the rights to do so on any number of different devices. The system does this by contacting the server to verify rights qualifications. And the final claim revolves around the style and presentation of channels through which users view the content, and the context through which the style is retrieved once a user has initiated the presentation of the digital content item.

Interestingly enough, none of these claims are related to online video in particular, but to digital media and content in general. That’s because in 2005, it wasn’t clear that Brightcove’s distribution business would be just about video, VP of marketing Jeff Whatcott told us in a phone interview. According to Whatcott, when Allaire and Mason were applying for the patent, they envisioned building a platform for delivering content online through a SaaS-based business model, but documented those ideas in a broad fashion.

The patent award comes as Brightcove is expected to soon seek an IPO. The video distribution platform has raised about $100 million since being founded, including a $12 million funding round about a year ago. The company hired a new CFO last fall, and was expected to go public as early as the first half of 2011. That timing seems unlikely now, but we wouldn’t be surprised if Brightcove sought an IPO by the end of the year.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user Steve Snodgrass.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

original post from:

http://gigaom.com/video/brightcove-patent/

Imagine Parkinson's at 29 or any Age: Illuminate Parkinson's : A Travelling Gallery Show by allan amato — Kickstarter

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This project to raise awareness re Parkinson's just launched on Kickstarter. I'm in as it hits close to home. The creators of the project Allan & Becky have a video on Kickstarter - check it out

"my name is allan, and I'm a commercial photographer. One of my best friends Becky has young onset parkinsons, and when she told me, I was both appalled and confused. I'd never heard of that before. Parkinson's is something to worry about when you're older, right? Wrong. Becky was diagnosed when she was 29. I was surprised at my own lack of awareness, and equally desperate to help. So together we came up with a campaign featuring a few fancy faces I'd already counted among my clients, and a travelling gallery show featuring the actual sufferers of this disease. Thusfar we have shot such luminaries as Terry Gilliam, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman and Kevin Smith, with more to come. In fact, we ended up with so many wonderful celebs, I decided to restructure the show around suffer and support, the reality of Parkinson's alongside the hope we might soon find a cure. We are promoting autumn shows in Los Angeles, Edinburgh and Berlin, and we need your help to make them a reality. Take a look at our rewards, watch the video and if you feel moved, please consider backing our project!

thanks for listening and supporting our quest to illuminate parkinson's,

love allan and becky"