Intrepid readers readily informed us how to hack our brand-new PSPs to surf the web. Our site doesn’t look so bad on the hidden Sony browser.

If you weren’t at ShoWest then you missed out on the next big thing: 3-D movies! If that brought back memories of blue/red plastic glasses then you are 1) very old and 2) thinking of the wrong kind of 3-D. We’re talking no-glasses digital virtual reality here people. At least that’s what it is if you listen to Lucas:

Appearing as part of a sextet of high-profile directors promoting 3-D and digital cinema at film industry convention ShoWest on Thursday, Lucas said he hadn’t yet committed to a precise schedule but hoped to have the first film ready for the 30th anniversary of the original “Star Wars” movie in 2007 and that he would then rerelease one “Star Wars” film per year in 3-D.

Considering all the success Lucas has had in forcing theaters to switch to digital, getting them to switch to 3-D is a no-brainer. Either that or he’s just milking the Star Wars franchise one more time. I’m sure that this super-duper-hyped-up-3-D version is really what his true vision for the original Star Wars was…

We don’t know what is more embarassing: the way in which Variety uses the words “logged on” in its writeup or the fact that someone is actually trying to make a movie based on Friendster.

Director Harold Ramis and Topher Grace have logged on to a Universal romantic comedy based on the popular online service Friendster. Grace sparked to the chance to play a character looking for love while navigating technology such as instant messaging, camera phones and Internet porn. Producers made a deal last year with Friendster CEO Jonathan Abrams to use the friendship and networking site as the catalyst for a romantic comedy.

I can see the development exec meeting now: “Maybe if we just throw in as many new technologies into a script we can make a movie out of it! And hey, I like internet porn so let’s throw that in too!”

Careful what you wish for.

Over at engadget you can find this excellent article that easily explains why DLP, one of the many new HDTV formats competing for your wallet, should be on your list of things to drool over:

Q: Why DLP over other technologies?

A: There are two main reasons why people buy DLPs over other technologies such as plasma or LCD. First, they don’t wear out. DLP projectors can’t suffer from burn-in and there is nothing to fade or wear out. The picture from a two year old DLP Television (with a new bulb) will look exactly like the day you brought it home. Second, there is no screen-door effect*. The mirrors on the DMD are very close together. This means that more of the screen is used to display content.

It will cost a mere $53.3 million but that will buy Ireland 515 new digital cinema projectors. Meanwhile, the Irish can now laugh at America’s dinosaur status:

Ireland was picked as the first region to get the full digital cinema treatment because it is a manageable size and it has the second-highest level of cinema attendance in Europe, with 80 percent of its films coming from Hollywood, Cummins says.

“There are about 40 screens in the U.S. that are using the digital projectors, but they aren’t tethered to any sort of network. This will the first time a nationwide digital network will be rolled out,” Cummins says. “This is the best way to show the industry what is possible with digital technology.”

Apparently the news that Tivo was dying was premature. The good news is that Tivo will still be around to drive TV Network executives mad with frustration. The bad news is that all the other rumors that we considered here on BBB will not come to pass.

Under the terms of the agreement, Comcast and TiVo will work together to develop a version of the TiVo service that will be made available on Comcast’s current primary DVR platform. New software will be developed by TiVo and will be incorporated into Comcast’s existing network platforms. The new service will be marketed with the TiVo brand, and is expected to be available on Comcast’s DVR products in a majority of Comcast markets in mid-to-late 2006.

In the future when everyone watches high-resolution displays beauty really will be skin-deep. OnHD publishes a hilarious list of which celebrities look terrible once the powerful lens of HDTV is focuse on their hideous blemishes and which ones look better. I know, we also have no idea how anyone could possibly look better in High-Def.

3. Britney Spears
The pop tart is still in her early 20s, but she looks about
10 years older in high-def. Her face is puffy and she’s
starting to show wrinkle marks around her lips,
reportedly from a two pack-a-day cigarette habit.

Our recommendation for all future celebs: carry a super-size bottle of vaseline for liberal application to any lens. Unless you want to suffer the hypercritical eye of the masses.

Earlier here on BBB we published a rumor that was floating around the wireless elite about the new iTunes phone. According to those in the ‘know,’ Motorola scrapped their new iTunes phone intro at the last minute due to concerns from wireless carriers. In an attempt to deflect attention away from their precarious relationship with carriers, Motorola now claims that the delay was due to none other than Steve Jobs:

In response to a question about why Motorola did not show its upcoming iTunes phone at the Cebit technology fair in Germany Motorola said it tends to display its products before they go on the market but Apple’s Chief Executive Steve Jobs does not.
[...]
“Steve’s perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday.” he added.
[...]
He also downplayed a question about whether the reason Motorola did not unveil the phones at Cebit was because of a disagreement with mobile phone carriers.

“I’ve got lots of carriers fighting to be the first one we go with,” Garriques said in an interview.

Those execs are really bright. I almost believed them. Then again, pissing Steve Jobs off has worked so well for Eisner maybe they figured they could just follow in his footsteps.

The brave new world of tapeless camcorders has been dawning over the last couple of years. In the past, video cameras which used hard drives or flash memory to store video were low-quality toys designed to appeal to early adopters. Electronics manufacturers are beginning to make tapeless cameras of higher quality:

Similar to the single-CCD Everio camcorders launched in the fall of 2004, the GZ-MC500 is capable of recording up to 60 minutes of DVD-resolution video at 720 x 576 pixels onto a 4 GB Microdrive. New as of this model is the three separate 1.33 Megapixel CCD imaging censors, catering separately to red, green and blue colours.

It’s only a matter of time before all video cameras contain hard drives. It’s also only a matter of time before all these cameras contain wireless antennas to transfer their data straight to a waiting laptop. Imagine your editor being able to edit in realtime. No tapes. No transfers. No dubbing.

We have mentioned the ongoing battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats on BBB before. While most of our readers think the conflict is old hat, this article at softpedia has been making the rounds.

The future of DVD is still unclear, but what is certain is that a replacement is already needed and looked upon. And the favorite candidates seem to be Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. But things are far from being settled yet, as far as these two formats are concerned.

They go on to list the stats that we are all familiar with: A Blu-ray consortium led by inventor Sony is supported by Dell, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Electronic Arts, Vivendi, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Disney, Apple and other electronics manufacturers with a $450 billion warchest. An HD-DVD consortium led by inventor Toshiba and supported by NEC, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros and New Line Cinema has only a $221 billion warchest.

Softpedia points out that the battle over the future formats is futile because by the time the industry decides on a winner a more advanced technology will come along to obsolete it:

… because both formats, so debated since the beginning of 2004, may find themselves outrun by the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD).
While Blu-Ray and HD-DVD use the same laser, other producers thought of combining the two lasers (red and blue), in a single ray and thanks to Optware , on a disc the size of a CD or DVD, 1 TB of data could be stored (20 times more than on a Blu-Ray disc), with a transfer rate of 1 Gbit/s.

The format is developed by the Japanese company Optware, in collaboration with Fuji Photo and CMC Magnetics. The three companies allied with Nippon Paint, Pulstec Industrial and Toagosei and “HVD Alliance” was born.

Wait, another format? Are you confused yet? It gets worse. We’re not sure why Softpedia is so gung ho for HVD when there are other holographic storage systems out there:

The research arm of the communications giant has developed a cheap, postage stamp-sized alternative, dubbed Info-MICA. NTT is betting that Hollywood will be particularly keen on the all-plastic medium, because Info-MICAs are hard to pirate.

NTT unveiled its 1-gigabyte prototype earlier this year, and the first commercial versions are slated to hit the market in 2005.

At this point your brain should be hurting. Since we here at BBB live in the future so that you don’t have to, we’d like to point out an analogy: who uses floppy disks anymore? That’s right, all of these technologies are obsolete because no one is going to want to have to carry plastic discs of any kind if they can have every movie they own accessible instantaneously.

But we can hear the naysayers already: “But people like having something tangible in their hands! What will people give each other as gifts? People like shiny plastic discs!”

All we have to say is that was the same argument that the record companies were making when Napster first appeared. Look what good it did them. Tangible discs are so retro.

BoingBoing editor and world renowned author Cory Doctorow has published some of his notes from the recent Emerging Tech conference in San Diego. Of particular interest to BBB readers are his notes on “Emerging Massive Media”:

Here are my notes from Paula Le Dieu’s Emerging Massive Media, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Paula is the outgoing head of the BBC’s Creative Archive project, which will turn all the material in the BBC’s archive into stuff that can be remixed and reused by Britons. She’s now taken on the gig of running the International Creative Commons, though she will still be working on the Archive.

“Audiences are acquiring media under their own terms, or more frighteningly for the incumbents, acquiring it from their own suppliers on the networks. Broadcasters broadcast to active, self-commissioning audiences, who decided on their own the what where when and how.

Prosumers are becoming the mass media—but what about the massive media? How do they compete with their audiences for attention?

For many massive media orgs, the competition is viewed as heavily weighed in their favor. Every time Wikipedia trounces yet another massive media org (e.g. the NYT yesterday) it creates ripples of doubt in the massive orgs.

Last year Joi Ito gave a keynote at a TV con, to international TV execs: he said: “Re DRM: you will win. You will convince your audiences not to use your content.” When Patrick Kennedy VP of Sony Digital Networks said, “Get your stuff out there any way you can, youngsters don’t even know who you are anymore. Worry about the business model later.” Massive media orgs aren’t comfortable anymore.”

That Joi Ito quote is a keeper.

The more things change, the more they stay the same (NYTimes, Reg. Req’d):

In a nascent trend that may vastly complicate life for publishers of entertainment listings, Web sites are beginning to schedule network TV-type lineups of shows. If viewers miss a scheduled program, they must wait and hope for it to show up again. These efforts offer a sharp contrast to the video-on-demand approach for which the Web has become known, but which, executives and analysts said, may not represent the medium’s future.

If we were the wagering type, we’d be putting our money on the “executives and analysts” who don’t buy into this strategy. You may be scratching your head and wondering how these guys ever came up with this idea in the first place…

Mr. Liu said that he prevailed in an internal company debate in eschewing the video-on-demand approach. “With video-on-demand, chances are there are topics they won’t click on, because they won’t think they need to see it. But if they did, they’d say ‘Oh my gosh - I didn’t know this,’ “ he said. “It’s the exact inverse of what other people are doing, but we think it’s a far more powerful way of servicing users and advertisers.”

There’s your answer. Mr. Liu suddenly fancies himself a network scheduling programmer and likes the extra money advertisers will give him by forcing people to watch less interesting programs. Guess how long that will last? We’d tell you but we’re too busy watching the bridal fashion show.

Sometimes all that cheap digital video and computer editing power can have unexpected consequences:

BAQUBAH, Iraq — When Pfc. Chase McCollough went home on leave in November, he brought a movie made by fellow soldiers in Iraq. On his first night back at his parents’ house in Texas, he showed the video to his fiancee, family and friends.

This is what they saw: a handful of American soldiers filmed through the green haze of night-vision goggles. Radio communication between two soldiers crackles in the background before it’s drowned out by a heavy-metal soundtrack.

“Don’t need your forgiveness,” the song by the band Dope begins as images unfurl: armed soldiers posing in front of Bradley fighting vehicles, two women covered in black abayas walking along a dusty road, a blue-domed mosque, a poster of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. Then, to the fast, hard beat of the music — “Die, don’t need your resistance. Die, don’t need your prayers” — charred, decapitated and bloody corpses fill the screen.

Needless to say that the family members who live in the relative comfort of civillian lives stateside were not amused. Oh well.

As if to reinforce our last posting that Asia always has cooler cellphone tech first, we discovered this bit of next-gen craziness:

“Most games and many other applications are written in 3D although the final image is shown in 2D,” says Ian Thompson, director of business development at Sharp Laboratories of Europe. “In nature humans see the world in 3D and yet we have become accustomed to seeing flat images”

That may be true today, but researchers in many laboratories, including Sharp’s, have their eyes set on the next generation of 3D technology. If mobile displays are necessarily limited by length and width, the only option is to increase their depth. And unlike the 3D movies of yesterday (and even today), the new 3D displays don’t require any special eyewear. Sharp is leading the charge, having supplied mobile phones equipped with “glasses-free” 3D displays to NTT DoCoMo for two years. The company claims that their first 3D handset “sold over 1.5 million units in the first 6 months of sales, more than all previous 3D products combined.” Of course, Sharp is not the only one convinced that mobile 3D is ready for prime time.

It would seem logical that if Apple can sell an iPod shuffle for $99 that you should be able to use your cellphone to play mp3s as well. Motorola and Apple decided to do just that and designed a iPod-like phone that could purchase tracks from the iTunes Music Store and hold about 100 tracks on the phone. While this new phone using wireless technology seems like the next logical step a large obstacle suddenly appeared:

Motorola had previewed the iTunes phone to the media earlier this week, with the intent of publicly announcing it Thursday. Then the company got a last-minute message from a wireless carrier or carriers, and indefinitely postponed the announcement--a highly unusual occurrence.

To make a long story short: electronics manufacturers who make phones are way ahead of the curve. You have probably noticed that people in Asia and Europe always have newer and cooler phones than us dinosaurs here in the USA. The reason for this is quite simple:

Why would a wireless carrier have such sway with the world’s second-largest cell phone-maker? Because of the unique structure of the industry: Wireless carriers--particularly in the U.S.--buy phones and then often subsidize their cost to consumers.

You see, we in America are cheapskates (nothing wrong with that, its all part of capitalism) but unfortunately this gives all the power to the carriers. And now the wireless carriers are each fighting for their own little piece of the wireless pie. Unlike the rest of planet Earth, we do not have a single wireless cellphone standard in the USA. The carriers see the trends towards eventually being stearmrolled into being dumb pipes and are doing everything in their power to prevent this from happening.

Remember “wireless internet” from five years ago? The carriers have always preferred the “walled garden” approach. Word on the street about the mysterious late-night phone call: the carriers have been impressed with the sales of ringtones so they decided that they should start their own music stores and it would be silly if they had to compete with market-leading Apple. Don’t you just hate progress?

A few posts back we discussed how demand for American TV shows had driven Britons to being the leader in TV piracy via the internet. To once again support this claim they have now turned to pirating their own programming:

The publicly funded broadcaster was forced into damage control mode when one of its most highly anticipated programs, the first new series of the revered sci-fi drama “Doctor Who” in 16 years, leaked out onto the Internet.

Thousands of fans, unwilling or unable to wait for the scheduled broadcast date in three weeks’ time, downloaded the show using the popular file-trading software BitTorrent and other file-trading networks.

A new show getting pirated before broadcast just really isn’t that big a deal anymore. What makes this whole situation ironic however, is that the BBC had intended to release the show on the internet as part of its distribution strategy already. Perhaps the BBC felt that if they paid homage to the ‘net that they would be protected but users are unlikely to prefer the BBC’s new DRM “enhanced” offerings to what is freely available online.

It is a familiar story to all of us, previously expensive domain of the few becomes digital and suddenly the rug is pulled out from under an entire industry:

For several years, as various factors conspired to engender a severe music industry recession, studio owners and managers, engineers, technicians and producers have voiced increasing fears about the future. Recording budgets shrank; rosters were trimmed. All the while, the tools and methods of recording were undergoing dramatic transformation.

Wolf Stephenson, an owner of recently shuttered Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Ala., spoke for many industry professionals when he said last month, “When computer and hard-disk recording really got cheap and better at the same time, it just knocked the socks off a lot of studios, (Muscle Shoals) included.”

As is typical in all these “doom and gloom” stories, Reuters tries to buoy those invested in the status quo with a ray of hope:

But large facilities will not disappear entirely: An orchestra cannot be recorded in an apartment, nor can any self-respecting jazz or rock combo. “There may be some work going away because of the home studios,” says engineer Al Schmitt, speaking from Avatar Studios in New York. “But (for) the rhythm-section stuff, brass and orchestra things, it’s still the good studios with the good consoles.

Unfortunately, they’ve missed the mark entirely. We here at BBB frequently record orchestras on our laptops using the power of software synthesizers and samplers. Instead of lamenting about the few highly paid musicians they should be writing about the millions of new musicians. The sum total of the music in the world is increasing exponentially not dying out like the dinosaurs.

Would you believe Reuters if it said that mini-DV tape was destroying the film industry?

No one can say it better than Lessig:

You’ll be pleased to know that communism was defeated in Pennsylvania last year. Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the Reds in local government from offering free Wi-Fi throughout their municipalities. The action came after Philadelphia, where more than 50 percent of neighborhoods don’t have access to broadband, embarked on a $10 million wireless Internet project. City leaders had stepped in where the free market had failed. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from free Internet access to Karl Marx. So Rendell, the telecom industry’s latest toady, even while exempting the City of Brotherly Love, acted to spare Pennsylvania from this grave threat to its economic freedom.

What is Playlistism you ask? Now that iTunes uses an Apple technology called “Rendezvous” your music collection can shared with those around you. With wireless networks popping up everywhere this leads to some interesting situations. You can now hate/love people based on their terrible taste in music as opposed to the cliche race, religion and other traditional categorizations.

But this technology also gives us a new way to flirt with hot women (or hot men if that’s your fancy):

It had to belong to the girl with dark hair by the counter. I saw her when I got my coffee. Took note, lovely. Her. Her?

There is no music on my PowerBook. I offloaded my library to a drive that is to remain perpetually hooked up to my new Mac mini, serving away at home. Nonetheless, I shared my empty library out under the name “maria i sweat your music collection <3.”

I waited. I listened to selections from her library: Low, Manual. And then the sound skipped. I flipped to iTunes. Her library title had changed: “try_the_new_dalek.”

And he’s not the only one. His entire college campus is now redefining social hierarchy via iTunes libraries:

Aubrey said Wesleyan students are enjoying a new parlor game—going through music libraries trying to guess what their owners are like. At any one time, 30 or 40 iTunes libraries are available on the campus network, which is shared by about 2,000 students.

“This one playlist had a lot of German techno,” Aubrey said. “We predicted this was a kid wearing a mesh shirt who wanted to be a Nazi.” At a party shortly afterward, Aubrey recognized the playlist and asked whose music it was. “They pointed to this kid in a mesh shirt with a swastika on his arm,” Aubrey said.

Now excuse us while we go delete all the German Techno tracks from our iTunes. We wouldn’t want to give any potential mates the wrong idea.

Jeff Jarvis mentions a strange epiphany he had when he realized that both he and censorious, religious, zealots were agreeing on the future of TV technology:

There’s an odd consensus of sorts forming around the notion that thereal solution to is to kill broadcast and increase choice.

Jonathan Rintels at CreativeVoices. just sent me this email:

We debated the Parents TV Council on CNBC last night. Rather than endorse Sen. Ted Stevens’s call today to extend FCC broadcast indecency regs to cable and satellite, we were pleasantly surprised (shocked?!) that PTC agreed that our solution was far preferable: give consumers the right to pick and choose what cable channels they want, rather than eat the broadcasters’ and cable companies’ “packages,” larded with channels that offend them. PTC went on to say that technology would soon solve the problem of objectionable content on cable, via VOD and digital cable boxes.

A video of the encounter on CNBC can be viewed online.