UK soldiers use iPad app to train for Afghan operations

For the first time, UK troops are using a special app developed for the iPad to learn how to handle a fire mission. The BBC reports.

In early trials at the Royal School of Artillery in Wiltshire, troops have learned the jargon and procedures more quickly than before, when they were sat listening to lessons from instructors.

It's hoped smartphone and tablet technology could be used to speed up training across the army.

Read full article.

Anti-P2P lawyers accused of copyright hypocrisy

The US Copyright Group has gone after 14,000+ P2P users in court so far this year. But, when it comes to its own websites, do the lawyers have a piracy problem of their own?

[via arstechnica]

'Gossip Girl' has 'more active viewers' in China than U.S. thanks to Interne

The CW's "Gossip Girl" isn't on television in China. But the producers say it has more viewers there than in the U.S, reports The New York Daily News.

There's also at least one other country where "Gossip Girl" is mostly an online adventure: France.

"We're on TV there," says executive producer Josh Schwartz. "But it's like a year after the shows are made and it's 4:30 on Sunday afternoon and it's done with really bad dubbing. "So most of our fans there watch us online."

Read about subfans, for the most part students, college kids, or TV series fans who work in a group to subtitle all the episodes of an entire season using the Teletext transcripts which are available in English. The French translation is then synched with the original episode, taking into account commercials if there are any.

Apparently, subfans are very critical of the official translations done by French TV channels. They claim translations are "water downed" versions" of the original. As their dubbing is not endorsed by the networks, their work is considered rogue and counterfeit.

YouTube increases Upload Time from 10 to 15 mn

YouTube filled the top request from its users July 29, increasing its upload time from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. [via eWeek]

Many of these self-made auteurs are looking to make a career of video production, and they like to use YouTube as their main utility to bare their wares to the public to let them comment and vote on their content. The more time erstwhile producers have to play with, the more adventurous they may be with their videos.

Read full article.

The Facts, The Stats And The Story About Youtube

Interesting facts and history of YouTube from MindJumpers.

Russian Court Bans YouTube Over Extremist Video

A local court in far east Russia has banned YouTube as well as four other sites, reports NewTeeVee.

The court, which is in the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, ruled that local Internet service provider Rosnet could block its users from accessing the world’s largest video sharing site due to extremist videos that had been uploaded by some of its users.

Read full article.

YouTube signs local SF TV station

YouTube has teamed up with a San Francisco television station, ABC7 News, to publish video news reports produced by citizens.

This is the first time the world's largest video-sharing website has struck a partnership deal with a local news provider, reports The Guardian.

'Video is Dead,' Analyst Laura Martin Declares

Speaking at the Independent Show in Baltimore, Analyst Laura Martin, a Needham & Co. media analyst, urged them to focus on higher-margin businesses than their core video offerings. That means broadband services, mobile products and commercial customers, reports Broadcasting & Cable.

What's dead this year is video," she said. "It's a very sad thing. The programmers are destroying the video business.

Read full article.

Wall Street Journal Creates Hedcut For Don Draper of Mad Men

Following Sunday night's premier of Mad Men Season 4, The Wall Street Journal imagined what the signature dot-ink portraits hedcut would look like for Don Draper of Mad Men.

The Journal’s signature dot-ink portraits weren’t launched until 1979, and this season “Mad Men” takes place in 1964.

[via Laughing Squid]

Apple sued over iPad overheating in sunlight

The suit, filed Friday in federal court in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is seeking class-action status and asks for unspecified damages because the device "overheats so quickly under common weather conditions." The suit says Apple's iPad "does not live up to the reasonable consumer's expectations created by Apple.

[Bloomberg via News.com]

Study: iPad Owners Are "Selfish Elites"

According to a new study the psychological profile of iPad owners can be summed up as “selfish elites” while have-not critics are “independent geeks.” Wired reports.

Consumer research firm MyType conducted the study, in which opinions of 20,000 people were analyzed between March and May. The firm’s conclusion was that iPad owners are six times more likely to be “wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50 year olds". In other words, “selfish elites.”

Read full article.

Mad Smoke: Every Cigarette Smoked in Mad Men

Spotted on boingboing a video people smoking cigarettes in Mad Men by Whirled.

UK Viewers who watch TV on computer face licence fee

V iewers who watch television on their computers could pay a licence fee from early next year, reports The Telegraph.

Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, has hinted that he may discuss the plan with Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, when the corporation's funding review takes place next year.

Read full article.

Previously: - License Fee Police may target UK users fr watching TV online

Mass BitTorrent Lawsuits Now Target Private Trackers

Mass lawsuits against alleged file-sharers are spreading like a plague of locusts from Europe over to the United States.

[via TorrentFreak]

YouTube testing new form of embedding

YouTube has announced this weekend that they have begun testing a new way of embedding code that would support both HTML5 and Flash.

[via Afterdawn]

Chatroulette Threatens Perverts With Police

Chatroulette has announced that it is going to take steps against the worst offenders on its service, threatening people who exposed themselves to minors with the police, reports NewTeeVee.

Site founder Andrey Ternovskiy said in a message published on the site Friday night that his company has started to collect evidence and has contacted law enforcement officials about the issue. “We’ve captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behavior,” he wrote, adding that he hopes that law enforcement will finally help the site to solve this problem.

This is what you see when you connect to Chatroulette:

Only 0.3% of files on BitTorrent confirmed to be legal

The large majority of content found on BitTorrent is illegal according to a new study out of the University of Ballarat in Australia reports arstechnica.

... The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used. Each file was manually checked to see whether it was being legally distributed. Only three cases—0.3 percent of the files—were determined to be definitely not infringing, while 890 files were confirmed to be illegal.

Read full article.

The jury for the YouTube/Gugggenheim Biennial to include Takashi Murakami

The jury selecting the 20 videos for YouTube Play, the video biennial in October that is the brainchild of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and YouTube, has been finally been chosen. And it includes recognizable names in the fields of art, music, film and video (Takashi Murakami, Douglas Gordon, Animal Collective...)

[via The New York Times]

Previously: YouTube Videos to be Shown at Guggenheim

YouTube launches a music video discovery page

A new section of the site called YouTube.com/music wrangles all of the hosted music videos and puts them into neatly sorted categories. On top of it all is a section for "today's hits" which is a listing of the most popular music videos that have been played on the service; YouTube says this is updated every two hours.

[via Cnet. Post in YouTube Blog]

Flipboard Launches IPad App to Adulation, Rush of Users

PC World reports on Flipboard, a new iPad application that presents the news links in a user's Twitter and Facebook media streams in the style of a magazine.

The app, which is free, attempts to help people make sense of the huge amount of news content that is now shared through social media networks and links directly into a user's Twitter and Facebook feeds. It also contains several channels programmed by the company containing tech news, culture, music and other subjects.

Click on a channel and articles are presented as they might look in a magazine, with headlines and a few paragraphs of the story next to a picture. Clicking on any part of a story opens up a page with the entire article. If nothing on the page is of interest then a swipe across the screen will flip the page to the next screen.

By inputting a Twitter or Facebook stream into the application, the user automatically gets previews of the stories being passed around by their friends and sources and so doesn't have to rely on a subject line or URL to make a decision on whether to open a link.

Read full article and a glowing review from Scobleizer with an exclusive first interview of Flipboard CEO Mike McCue by Robert Scoble on YouTube.

Will Internet TV Be a Victim of Bandwidth Caps?

Bandwidth caps might not affect many users now, but with services like Netflix streaming and Hulu Plus just gaining momentum, research firm iSuppli warns that carrier plans to set limits on the amount of bandwidth consumers use could pose a threat to the emerging Internet TV segment.

[via NewTeeVee]

Swedish Pirate Party members launch anonymous, log-free ISP

Two members of the political Piratpartiet have big plans to launch its own ISP that delivers service in line with the party's ideals. It won't be like your standard ISP, though: the Pirate ISP founders say that users will be responsible for fixing and maintaining their service, and that privacy will be one of its highest priorities.

[via arstechnica]

UltraViolet film system tested

A group of media and electronics companies will soon start testing a system that will let you watch films you buy wherever you are, regardless of formats and other technical hurdles. Like ATMs, your account would follow you, no matter what brand of machine you use. UKPA reports.

The group has also come up with the name UltraViolet for the open standard it is creating, which it was unveiling on Tuesday.

The open standard, backed film studios including Warner Brothers and technology companies such as Microsoft, represents a challenge to owned formats from Apple and others. Those formats lock buyers of video content to limited numbers of devices, such as the iPad or Apple TV.

Backers of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem hope to kick-start growth of digital film purchases, now just four per cent of all sales, by freeing consumers of format concerns.

Read full article.

Related article:- Introducing UltraViolet: Buy Your Digital Movie Once, Play It Anywhere? (NPR)

France’s Three-Strikes Law for Internet Piracy Hasn’t Brought Any Penalties

Since the French government set up an agency to implement the" Three-Strikes Law" or "Hadopi" early this year, not a single warning has been sent out; not a single broadband connection has been cut.

[via The New York Times]

Booming Demand for TV on the Internet in China

Every month, about 300 million people in China are using a computer to watch Chinese TV dramas, Japanese and Korean sitcoms, and even American films and television series like “Twilight” and “Gossip Girl.” The New York Times reports.

Analysts say young people in China are even starting to favor free laptop-viewing over TV sets, in part as a way to make an end run around regulators, who often bar state-run TV networks from broadcasting shows that do not meet the approval of the Communist Party.

It is a momentous shift in viewing habits that has not gone unnoticed by the authorities in Beijing. They are tightening oversight of online video sites and also pushing state-run television networks to form their own Internet TV sites in an effort to retain control over what viewers can watch online.

Read full article.

Ridley Scott to lead YouTube documentary project

Oscar-winning documentary director Kevin Macdonald and producer Ridley Scott want to use YouTube to turn a camera on the world. The Washington Post reports.

The project, called "Life in a Day," will seek nonfiction video submissions from around the globe in hopes of weaving together a snapshot collage of one 24-hour period of human life.

The idea is to encourage would-be directors to take out their cameras on July 24, shoot some footage and upload the results to YouTube, no editing required.

Macdonald will sift through the entries and curate a full-length documentary using the clips as raw material. He also plans to show the final product at the Sundance Film Festival in January, with YouTube picking up the tab to fly 20 of the top submitters to the premiere in Park City, Utah.

At its core, the concept is certainly not new. There have been photo collections, for instance, titled "A Day in the Life" featuring images captured in a day in specific locations such as Africa, Ireland and Italy.

Read full article.

TED launches TEDWomen

TED, in partnership with The Paley Center for Media, has announced that it will be hosting a two-day conference this December called TEDWomen focusing on innovation and ideas by women and girls worldwide.

[via The Huffington Post]

Chatroulette Launches Channelroulette and Localroulette

Chatroulette introduced a number of new features this week, including local channels dubbed Localroulette that allow users to connect to other participants in the same country or region. Another feature dubbed Channelroulette essentially allows users to start their own themed channels to meet up with friends and strangers alike.

[via NewTeeVee]

Internet overtakes television in Middle East and North Africa

Internet users in the MENA region spend more time surfing the web than they do watching television. MIddle East Online reports.

An online survey of media consumption habits found 88 per cent of respondents browse the internet daily, while only 70 per cent of those questioned said they watched TV every day of the week.

Just 25 per cent of the respondents said they watched TV for more than three hours a day, compared with the 51 per cent who said they spent more than three hours a day surfing the web.

Read full article.

Auschwitz 'I will survive' dance video is internet sensation

A video showing Holocaust survivor Adolek Kohn and his grandchildren singing and dancing to the tune "I will survive" at the entrance to the Auschwitz death camp has provoked a storm of controversy after receiving more than half a million hits on YouTube. The Independent reports.

I say good for them. Living well is always the best revenge.

Kohn, who dances throughout the video with the word 'Survivor' on his shirt, said that he did not mind dancing. "If somebody had asked me then that I would come 62 years later with my grandchildren to Auschwitz, I would send him to a madhouse,".

The video has been removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim by APRA. But you can view it on French video sharing site Dailymotion.