Try saying that title three times fast. Apparently Scoopt acts as a middleman that sells cellphone pics to news agencies and splits the profits with the snapshooter. Of course, wasn’t the whole point of the ‘net to cut out the middleman?

Who will take tomorrow’s front page photograph - a professional press photographer or a passer-by armed with a cameraphone?

Considering how crappy most phonecam photos look, we’re sure that pro photographers won’t have anything to worry about for awhile. Unless they live in Japan or South Korea in which cellphone cameras are already of professional level quality. 

Among those of us in the information underground (what, did you think like Al Gore that this was a highway?) the NYTimes ranks just above the National Enquirer in terms of technology coverage. The New York Times is quite often late to the game if it bothers to arrive at all. So you’ll understand the chuckle we all had when we saw this story on video blogging:

After blogging came photo blogging and then, suddenly last year, video blogging. Video bloggers, also known as vloggers, are people who regularly post videos on the Internet, creating primitive shows for anyone who cares to watch. Some vlogs are cooking shows, some are minidocumentaries, some are mock news programs and some are almost art films.

At this rate it will only take the New York Times about another decade to realize television is dying. In the meantime we enjoy their use of the term “vlogging” which is so last week. The new hip term kids are using these days is “vodcasts” (for video-on-demand) which for the first time is a slang that halfway makes sense. Remember folks, you heard it here first. Next year when the NYT does a front-page article on the “new” trend of vodcasting you’ll smile that smug smile of self-satisfaction.

Reuters nervously twitches its hands as it laments that 90% of DVR owners skip past ads:

TV advertisers are facing a potential disaster as more consumers buy digital video recorders (DVRs), according to a new study, since about 90 percent of current users fast-forward through ads.

Tell us something we don’t know. It is obvious to us here at BBB that soon product placement will dominate all motion graphic media while we sit back and enjoy a can of classic Coca Cola(TM).

I am sure that you all remember with trepidation the day that we breathlessly reported how Internet Cosmonauts Google had launched their rocket- er campaign- to destroy TV. Of course, the problem back then was that you could only search TV transcripts (translation: the really boring text for deaf people that you get when you accidentally hit the “mute” button on that mutant Japanese remote for your Hi-Fi entertainment center).

Then we revealed that Google was accepting user-submitted uploads of video! Knowing the kind of horrible crap most people record onto their given-to-me-by-mom-and-dad-on-xmas camcorders, we trembled with anticipation: surely the next Steven Spielberg would be found!

And today fair readers, you can finally see (and search through) these uploaded videos.

I’ve been amazed by your cool videos. I had never seen a robot dog harassing an iguana before, or a monkey doing karate, and I had no idea you were such good dancers. There’s more than home video, too - like this UNICEF story featuring David Beckham.

If that isn’t an explanation of the current box office slump we don’t know what is…

We found this amazing little piece of software through our friends over at BoingBoing:

HOWTO Stream from iTunes to your mobile phone (without Apple’s permission)

DittyBot is a script for OS X that uses a clever combination of mobile email and VoIP to stream music from your iTunes collection to your cellphone. Using your phone, email the title/artist info for a song in your iTunes library to DittyBot, which is running on your Mac, pulling down mail every minute. DittyBot receives the request, calls you with Skype, and plays the song back to you over voice-over-IP using iTunes. Wow.

This a good example of the law of unintended consequences. As all of our daily interactions become digital it becomes very easy to turn anything into a dumb pipe. Using your cellphone to stream music from your home computer may not be very practical for the average joe today but this is just a sign of what is yet to come.

There is a surreptitious war taking place right outside your door and you don’t even know its happening. Amazon’s A9 and Google are fighting over who will provide better photos of your front door:

Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities.

The move would trump Amazon’s A9 service, which offers two-dimensional photos of buildings on US city streets.

The trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped. This would complement the mostly top-down view of San Francisco available through Google’s Keyhole satellite photo application.

The goal is to create similar 3D online versions of other cities in the US and overseas.

We can’t wait for people to create the first 3D San Francisco quake level so that we can blow up the cross on Mt. Davidson.

I guess that one post on Slashdot can say it all:

I felt something, a disturbance in the network, as if a million mac zealots cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced

Apple is switching to intel. Must be a cold day in hell right now.

The New York Times has an amusing article about Akimbo, a new product that promises to do to internet TV what Tivo did to regular TV. Only that the Akimbo completely sucks ass:

Unfortunately, Akimbo can offer only what the networks and cable channels are willing to contribute. And these days, just hearing the phrase “Internet downloads” generally sends television executives into paranoid fits. As a result, the Akimbo library is so puny and overpriced that the enterprise is interesting only as a “what not to do” case study.

Please people, wake up. This is getting pathetic. Last week we were reporting how the Brits are even ahead of us. Pretty soon we’re going to see articles how people starving to death in Somalia are watching pirated episodes of “Desperate Housewives” (pun intended?) while waiting in U.N. food lines. We cannot let this happen.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and we here at BBB always assume that you are) the hottest rumor on the internet this weekend is Steve Job’s supposed Monday announcement. Tomorrow morning (if the Wall Street Journal, Cnet News.com and Wired are correct) Steve will announce that Apple will start moving its computers to Intel processors.

I guess Apple will move to Intel, and they’re relying on a fast, seamless emulator to do it.

But it’s really about Hollywood: Apple’s looking to transform the movie industry the same way the iPod and iTunes changed the music business.

Our experts disagree with all the hoopla. First, these “apple will ditch IBM for Intel” stories crop up every couple of years as Apple tries to scare IBM during their contract negotiations. Secondly, while there was an opportunity to switch to Intel back when Mac OS X first came out, the amount of rewriting for all software developers would be a huge burden.

There is a slight chance that Steve will announce a new low-end line of computers (like the mac mini) that will use intel processors to reduce cost and that would make sense. Otherwise, not using Intel chips is one of Apple’s biggest advantages:

MacDailyNews has an editorial which summarizes reports from various research groups that analyzed the number of computer users affected by viruses. The conclusion was that 16 percent of all computer users are not affected by viruses because they use Macs. The lack of viruses on a Mac is commonly known, but the interesting thing is the fact that the results finally provide the first set of conclusive numbers which illustrate the Macintosh’s install-base. So far only “market-share” statistics are commonly published for the public and do not convey install base.

According to Wired the big switch is motivated by Hollywood. How does this happen? Apparently its because Intel is including super-secret digital rights management in its new Pentium D chips to prevent copyright infringement.

But we here at BBB are going to let you in on a little-known secret: the new DRM is bunk. According to engineering specs just released (that only geeky nerds like us read) there is no underlying DRM included in the new chipsets so that whole line of reasoning is BS.

The Inquirer has an official statement from Intel claiming the Computerworld Today Australia story from May 27th was incorrect, and the Pentium D and the 945 chipsets do not have unannounced DRM technology embedded in them. The statement says Intel products support or will support several copy protection schemes such as Macrovision, DTCP-IP, COPP, HDCP, CGMS-A, and others. The statement concludes: ‘While Intel continues to work with the industry to support other content protection technologies, we have not added any unannounced DRM technologies in either the Pentium D processor or the Intel 945 Express Chipset family.’

Stay tuned here to see what develops tomorrow.

According to a News.com article, Vonage is now testing new routers which will free VoIP subscribers from computers and landlines:

With the special router and handset, individual customers would be free to roam about their home or office, untethered from a modem or phone jack and without a connection to a laptop or desktop computer.

This is the equivalent to having a wireless handset that you probably already have in your house except that the phone is automatically routing the calls over the internet rather than a phone line (but you don’t need to be tethered to a computer with internet connection). This means you can buy one for grandma.

Already in Asia, you can buy cellphones with WiFi so that you can make cell calls over an internet connection rather than using precious minutes. Only a matter of time before cellular goes the way of the Dodo. Time to evolve people (that means you have to stop dragging your knuckles now).

Boing Boing has a great piece on Mark Cuban’s new release and distribution strategy for his feature films. Instead of doing theatrical releases followed by DVD and TV releases he is going to do it all at once and “let the audience decide”:

When I interviewed Mark Cuban earlier this year for a Wired Magazine feature on digital cinema (link), one of the things he mentioned about his movie biz plans involved changing the way films are released. Here’s how it works in Hollywood now: new theatrical releases are made available on DVD and pay-TV some time after they’ve left theaters. That “window\” of time has been shrinking in recent decades. Cuban said that his distribution company 2929 Entertainment, which he runs with business partner Todd Wagner, saw no point in this delay. “Let’s release everything all at once, and let the consumer decide,” their argument goes.

Several months later, they’re making good on those plans. Earlier this week, news broke that 2929 is doing just that, with Steven Soderbergh. The director will release six films through 2929 so that theater release, DVD and pay-TV all occur on the same day.

NPR has a great 10 minute segment investigating the growing chaos taking place in traditional media. Highlights include quotes from the head of Procter & Gamble’s advertising division stating that they want to take their $5.5 Billion underwriting away from TV…

“The collapse is coming.”

Over at the Long Tail blog, there is some fascinating analysis of the death of mainstream “mass” culture:

* Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
* Television: network TV’s audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
* Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
* Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
* Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
* Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

It’s always amusing when one form of media begins to note their own demise:

Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults who own MP3 players like Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod say they have downloaded podcast programs from the Internet, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

That means more than 6 million people are listening to a form of communication that emerged only last year, according to the nonprofit group.

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…

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.”

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.

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.

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?