What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
The Future Of Digital Media Will Feel More Like Silicon Valley Than Time Inc.
The biggest media story of this week: Vox, the company that produces sites like The Verge, Polygon and SB Nation, bought Curbed, the media company behind Eater, Racked, and its eponymous real estate news site Curbed.
Vox’s CEO Jim Bankoff and Curb’s founder Lockhart Steele spoke about their new marriage today at Business Insider’s IGNITION conference with Business Insider’s CEO Henry Blodget.
The theme? Will digital media companies like Vox, Gawker, BuzzFeed, and Business Insider ever start consolidating into big conglomerates like a new-age Time Inc.?
That seems to be the emerging trend, at least.
Bankoff seems to think so, but his answer as to how that will happen wasn’t what you’d expect. He focused on the technology that powers Vox media sites. Each site may look different to the user, but the back end is powered by something called Chorus, a platform for uploading content and ads to Vox media sites.
“Silicon Valley VCs like us because we’re using technology,” Bankoff said. “In Silicon Valley they celebrate hacker culture. Media is the same thing. Give them the environment and platform to make great things.”
So it comes down to great content, but it helps to have the tech that makes it easy for writers, videographers, and photographers get all that good stuff online.
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Pebble update with iOS 7 notification support now available
The latest Pebble for iOS app update is a big one: It brings support for iOS 7 notifications. With this type of support, you can now receive notifications from apps like Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Flickr, Dropbox, WhatsApp,…
German Director Proposes ‘One-Stop Shop’ For Free, Instant, But Non-Exclusive Licenses To Offer Films Online
It’s always heartening to come across new ideas for ways to make creations more widely available to the public while allowing artists to benefit. Here’s one from the German film director Fred Breinersdorfer, probably best known for his film “Sophie Scholl“. In an article that appeared recently on the newspaper site Süddeutsche.de (original in German), he complains about the fact that searching online for his film throws up plenty of unauthorized versions, but precious few authorized ones.
He recognizes that the absence of easy-to-find, easy-to-use legal offerings tends to drive people to infringing sites, and thus offers a radical suggestion for solving this problem. According to his plan, governments would bring in compulsory licensing, so that all films could be made available for anyone to offer online in any way they want, provided they share the proceeds with the people who create the films. He compares this with the mechanical licenses that are available for music. Here’s how it would work:
As soon as the usual terms of protection for theatrical release after the premiere [of a film] have expired, everyone would be entitled to offer copies on the Internet — non-exclusively. This would apply to classic films as well as to new releases. The collecting societies for copyright and related rights involved in a film and its screenplay could create the legal and technical framework for a “one-stop shop”, where the license can be obtained and settled in a second by clicking online. The licensee would then decide how to organize and finance the offering.
As Breinersdorfer explains, this would open up all kinds of interesting possibilities:
it could very soon be possible for someone to open a portal where you can watch all German comedies of the silent era up to “Kokowääh 2” as free streaming or a download, funded by advertising or “premium” accounts for the HD version. Another film connoisseur might make a portal with all the films of Oscar winners in the category “Best Supporting Actress”, and a third might be devoted to film noir, with the most comprehensive accompanying material, including Chinese subtitles. Anyone who wants to can combine advertising revenue with subscriptions or on-demand billing. An open market of freely-available films could arise against which the online film thieves would have a weak hand because their copies are often of lousy quality.
It’s a wonderful vision of how near-frictionless licensing of the world’s films would allow exciting speciality sites to be created by taking different “slices” through the cinematic repertoire. And it’s exactly how the online market for films ought to be developing by now — all the technology is there. Pity it will never happen given the dogmatic attitudes of the movie industry, fixated as it is on punishing copyright infringers rather than making money and spreading the joy of cinema.
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Bubbli for iOS lets you create amazing 360-degree photospheres
Bubbli is a new iPhone app that lets you create and share impressive 360-degree photospheres.
Android has included a Photosphere camera feature since Jelly Bean 4.2 was released last year, but iPhone users have been stuck with less-polished solutions like Microsoft’s Photosynth.
To get started with Bubbli, you’ll need a bit of guidance to learn how to hold the camera properly, but it’s fairly simple to figure out. By tilting the camera and pivoting in a circle around your phone, you’ll capture a bubble-shaped panorama of your surroundings. The free app uses a painting method to help you keep track of what you’ve recorded.
Don’t be too worried if your photosphere looks weird once you’re done recording, as Bubbli needs to send the photos to the cloud for stitching. It’s forgiving, but you’ll still need to move slowly and consistently when capturing. As an added bonus, you can also record the ambient sound to make your bubble even more immersive.
Here’s a quick photosphere I took at my local strip mall:
This was my first try, so it’s a bit rough. You can see some blurred out areas where I skipped spots, but the overall result was fairly seamless.
This post from Bubbli co-founder Terrence McArdle will give you a better sense of what the app is capable of:
Bubbli has been a few years in the making. The creators first debuted the technology at TED in 2011 shortly after closing a $2 million funding round led by August Capital. The startup has apparently been in stealth mode for so long that Crunchbase had marked Bubbli as closed. Thankfully, the team kept at it and the wait is now over.
Related: 10 simply breathtaking 360-degree Photo Spheres uploaded by the Google Views community
Image credit: Shutterstock / Captain Yeo
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