The Future of Media

Agree or disagree, interesting statistics in here.

Social Networking: Where We Came From

Social Networks: Past, Present & Future - Social networking seems to have exploded, but as with most other applications involving the Internet, there is an experimental, elemental past. And there is a long ways yet to go.

Mobile Device Use in Pictures

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Xmarks acquired by LastPass, Goes Freemium

The Xmarks cross-browser bookmark synchronization service nearly had to shut down earlier this year because the company was running out of funding and still hadn't found a sustainable business model.

LastPass, a software company that offers a cross-platform password synchronization tool, has acquired Xmarks and is moving the product to a freemium model.

Xmarks users who are willing to pay $12 a year for the new premium version of the service will get extra features, including access to the new Android and iPhone mobile applications.

Xmarks has more than 4.5 million users syncing more than 1 billion bookmarks across five million computers. LastPass thinks the new "freemium" model will work because it did for LastPass.

Hands-on: Xmarks acquired by LastPass, launches mobile apps

Mobile Video Advertising Will Have its Challenges, But it is Coming

One issue is translating video authored for a bigger and wider PC screen, automatically, even when it might be necessary to remove some of the information.

Google Research Blog: "Pan and Scan" for Mobile Video

"Pan and scan" is a technique long used to fit wider movie images onto an analog NTSC TV screen. Engineers at Google say they now can do the same thing for video to be displayed on a mobile screen, rather than a larger PC screen.

Videos come in different sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios, but the device used for playback, may it be your TV, mobile phone, or laptop, only has a fixed resolution and form factor, Google engineers say.

As a result, you cannot watch your favorite old show that came in 4:3 on your new 16:9 HDTV without having black bars on the side, referred to as letterboxing.

Likewise, widescreen movies and user-videos uploaded on YouTube are shot using various cameras with wide-ranging formats, so they do not fit completely on the screen. As an alternative to letterboxing, several devices try to upscale the content uniformly, which either changes the aspect ratio, making everything look stretched out, or simply crop the frame, thereby discarding any content that cannot fit the screen after scaling.

Google Research, together with collaborators from Georgia Tech, says it has developed an algorithm that resizes (or retargets) videos to fit the form factor of a given device without cropping, stretching or letterboxing.

At some point, this is going to be important for providers of videos that will be viewed on mobile devices, and the business ecosystem (advertising, marketing, transactions) that will grow up around mobile video.

Official Google Research Blog: Discontinuous Seam Carving for Video Retargeting

Sprint Pushed for Deal Between Clearwire, T-Mobile - Bloomberg

Sprint Nextel Corp. supports a network accord between partner Clearwire Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA, said Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst Jason Armstrong, who met with Sprint management.

“Sprint indicated they have encouraged a wholesale deal,” Armstrong says. “Sprint would support a T-Mobile equity infusion into Clearwire."

There have been reports that Sprint's board was in disagreement about such a T-Mobile USA investment in Clearwire. On one hand, the deal would bring Clearwire cash it needs to finish construction of its national network. On the other hand, the deal would allow a competitor to proceed rapidly with a 4G service that might be tough to create any other way.

Were it to invest in Clearwire, T-Mobile USA would be able to buy capacity on Clearwire’s fourth-generation network at favored rates, as does Sprint Nextel.

Sprint Pushed for Deal Between Clearwire, T-Mobile - Bloomberg