Hacks of the uber-popular Microsoft Kinect have become an art form of late, and a recent music video created for the band Echo Lake is no different.
Reminiscent of Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video, the above vid — created by filmmaker Dan Nixon — has a tech-flavored spin.
Nixon says in a blog post on the band’s Tumblr: “As far as I know (and I’m scared of checking) this is the first music video to be made with the Microsoft Kinect camera. The footage was shot on that piece of £130 equipment and recorded to custom software running on a laptop. The depth data was then manipulated to get the whole band in one ’space’ and then the fun started.”
The single in the video, “Young Silence,” comes from the band’s upcoming disc by the same name, which debuts on Valentine’s Day.
Jim Kerr is the vice president of strategy for Triton Media, where he assists in the strategic growth and integration of all of Triton Digital’s portfolio companies and partners.
Ask any media company about their mobile strategy, and one of the first things they’ll discuss is their fantastic content strategy centered around their app. Dig a little deeper, however, and the frustration starts to show. Do they develop just for iOS? Do they add Android and Blackberry? Is Symbian dead? What about feature phones — should they just ignore these?
The answers are problematic for media, because if you peel back the excitement and dazzle of mobile tablet and phone device innovation, you find the kind of chaos that makes strategic planning nigh impossible.
The recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was a microcosm of this broader issue. Like many, I was dazzled by all the new products. But when you looked beyond the hype over the Xoom tablet, the Atrix cell phone or the Entune dashboard, the panels and hallway discussions suggested an underlying hardware ecosystem in significant flux.
Obstacles
I mentioned the difficulty in developing across multiple OSes in the cell phone and tablet space, but this is complicated now by multiple form factors, as well. From a cell phone screen to a 7 or 10” tablet, can you really make one size fit all? This problem of system complexity was addressed again and again at CES and continues to be an industry sore point.
The irony is that as systems have gotten more complex, content strategies have gotten simpler. The recent industry-wide media strategy of focusing on adapting content or cutting it into chunks and providing various pieces for various destinations is now practically dead. “Give consumers the content, and let them choose where to consume it,” is the mantra of the day. Of course, a strategic caveat is that consumers want content where and when they want it. But the “what” is now everything they could expect from other distribution sources, from DVDs to TV shows to radio stations.
This is what makes the underlying device and OS chaos all the more maddening for traditional media. They’ve finally figured out a content strategy, and their distribution strategy is up in the air.
This is true of phones and tablets, but to get a really good taste of these issues, just take a look at automobile dashboards as an illustrative example. There has been a tremendous amount of positive press about the potential for content creators in this realm, but even a quick survey of the digital dashboard ecosystem reveals it to be a total mess.
The lack of standards is an even bigger problem in dashboards, not to mention the very real concern over distracted drivers. Unlike a stand-alone device like a phone or a tablet, in-dash devices need to interact with other car systems, many of which are manufactured by third parties. Car dashboard system standards development has been painfully slow and is still nowhere close to a solution.
The Wild West
It is tempting to just say, “but that’s the dashboard, it’s different.” But UI and OS issues exist across all devices. QNX is a company with a long history in auto electronics infrastructure. At CES, Andrew Poliak, QNX director of automotive business development, basically threw up his hands in frustration over various OS differences. QNX’s solution is to develop an open web-based platform using their own codebase. Interestingly, this is the same OS that will be used by the Blackberry Playbook, one of the hyped new tablets expected out this year. In both cases, QNX parent company Research In Motion is making a large bet that openness and web-based standards will win out — in both tablets and in the dash. Their goal mirrors media content strategy perfectly: A consistent user experience across all devices.
In short, media faces a device and OS environment that is like the Wild West. While the expectations of the users are known, the OSes will change; the standards will change, and device innovation will continue. At this point, no one knows really what is worth fighting for or which UI will be the one that dominates. Will the chaos lead to a consolidation to three or even two dominant mobile OSes in the tablet and phone space? Will it all implode in a return to web standards and applications, powered by HTML5, as quite a few speakers at CES predicted?
Conclusion
For content companies, this chaos requires a deft strategic hand. If you listened to the conversations in the halls and paid attention to the panels, the momentum appears to be in favor of HTML5 and web-based solutions. Content-specific device apps are, at best, going to be disrupted and, at worst, going to be phased out entirely. Accepting this as the reality changes a lot of things for media companies, from the wisdom of large OEM app deals to creating a development team around iOS or Android development.
But this is still far from assured. In the short term, apps are still the key player in the device and content space. Dealing with the mess of cross-platform and cross-OS development is just something media has to do, although hedging their bets away from large-scale investment in one OS or OEM may be wise at this point.
The interesting thing is that it took years for media to realize that their mobile content strategy was ultimately quite simple. At the end of the day, perhaps their distribution strategy is just as simple: Hire a bunch of mobile web developers.
BillGuard, which is still in private beta, aims to alert users of unwanted charges such as hidden fees, billing errors, scams and fraud on credit card bills. BillGuard essentially crowdsources scams by alerting you when a charge on your bill is flagged by anyone else using BillGuard. The startup will also take into account its own analysis and monitor the web for any complaints about credit card scams.
Here’s how it works. The startup’s proprietary algorithm aggregates, mines, normalizes data from its own reports and from users. BillGuard will then scan your card activity daily, and email you when your attention is required.
While many credit card companies have fraud protection services, it’s up to the consumer to be vigilant about any billing errors or hidden fees on credit card bills. And if BillGuard ends up building a large user base, its crowdsourced information could be particularly useful.
Zothecula writes “Google has announced a collaboration with 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums that lets people view over 1,000 high res artwork images and 17 gigapixel images while taking a virtual stroll through their galleries using Street View technology. While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person, the Google Art Project could be the next best thing for those without the time and money to pop on a plane and trade elbows with crowds of tourists looking to catch a glimpse of what some of the best museums have on offer.”
Y Combinator startup Rapportive is updating its Gmail add-on Wednesday, bringing deep Facebook integration to the inbox.
Rapportive is a lightweight Gmail add-on that adds social intelligence to e-mail messages and occupies the same space as Xobni and Gist. Users can install the tool to get a quick glimpse at the e-mail sender’s online persona, complete with recent tweets and LinkedIn integration.
With the Facebook integration, Rapportive users can now request to add e-mail contacts as Facebook friends, see contacts’ recent Facebook updates, view photos, watch attached videos, “like” updates and add comments, all from within e-mail messages.
The integration essentially distills a contact-filtered and personalized version of the world’s largest social network, packages it up in a gift-wrapped box and leaves it at the user’s online doorstep — the inbox.
The purpose of the update, according to Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra, is to help users build rapport over Facebook from within their inbox, something he believes to be a very real possibility.
The problem with going to Facebook to build relationships, he says, is threefold. First, there’s the matter of taking the time to visit the site. Problem number two: “The news feed doesn’t really show me the people I’m corresponding with in my e-mail,” he says. “And finally, the default display only shows me popular items, as determined by Facebook’s algorithms.”
In his personal use, Vohra has found that using Facebook inside his inbox has a number of positive side effects, including enhancing relationships with contacts. “When it’s relevant, I post comments on my contacts’ facebook posts [via Rapportive]. This has actually created follow-on interactions from these people, which themselves turn into conversations,” he says.
Vohra was reluctant to share specifics on the size of Rapportive’s user base, but does say that the startup has added five times as many active users since August 2010. Rapportive, which has upwards of $1 million in angel funding, has also turned down a number of Series A offers, he says.
Personal finance startup 
