CONTENT
The legal battle ‘tween TiVo Inc. and EchoStar Communications over DVR technology has seen a full impact blow administered to the latter by the former, via the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. On November 29th, that office declared TiVo’s time warp patent to be valid. A $73 million award has already been won by TiVo in versus EchoStar, thanks to a jury award via litigation in Texas, subsequently appealed by EchoStar—that company indicates this latest Patent Office declaration will, in no way, affect their appeal of that Texas decision.
DELIVERY
Unilever, a huge consumer product company, has selected On2 Technologies‘ On2 Flix Publisher to provide enterprise video encoding and delivery services t their marketing groups across the world. Based on On2’s VP6 video compression schemes licensed by Adobe, On2 Flix Publishers offers a browser-based encoding and publishing solution for Adobe Flash Player 8 and 9. Users simply drag and
drop video creation and publishing on a web page. No special software installation is required. Anyone can literally become a video publisher, without special training or equipment. “Flix Publisher allows for a fast, easy and affordable deployment of a company-wide video publishing solution and gives our users a solution that requires no learning to get up and running immediately,” said Giampiero Corona, Global Projects Manager at Unilever. “With Flash video available on all our PCs, we can focus on the business objectives of our knowledge management repository rather than overcoming technical hurdles.”—Tarrytown, New York
CONTENT & DELIVERY
The battle for video game supremity continues to be waged between Sony and Nintendo. With the price of PlayStation 3 being absurdly high, seemed as though Nintendo and its Wii unit would take the crown. Ahhhh, as is the case with all things digital, never count your controllers out of any game. For the first time, PlayStation 3 games outsold Nintendo Wii games last month. Certainly helped that a lower cost PS3 debuted last October at a price of $361 and their older models’ prices were also cut… sales grew. Enterbrain, a trade mag, stated in November the Wii sold 159,193 consoles while the PS3 sold 183,217 units. For every Sony makes, Nintendo has a countermove, though.
For example, on December 1st, Nintendo released their WiiFit which is a balance board that interfaces to the unit to allow gamers to surf or even get into yoga. Expect this peripheral device to, once again, boost Wii ownerships, due to the uniqueness of the product. As it gets colder and colder as winter approaches, the game console war will continue to got hotter and hotter as the buying season intensifies.
CONTENT
At the San Jose Mercury News blog authored by Dean Takahashi, there’s information that some security researchers have determined it could be quite possible to steal the in-world money of users in Second Life. As these Linden dollars, as they are known, are directly convertible into U.S. dollars, this could become a problem. The ability to exploit this problem is through the use of Apple‘s QuickTime, the technology that’s used in Second Life to display video files. According to Takahashi’s blog, “The exploit works because Second Life allows users to embed videos or pictures on their characters or their virtual property,” Takahashi wrote. “When someone comes nearby and is within view of the object, the Second Life software activates QuickTime so it can play the video or picture. In doing so, QuickTime directs the Second Life software to a Web site. By exploiting the flaw in QuickTime, the hackers can direct the Second Life software to a malicious Web site that then allows them to take over the Second Life avatar.” A hacker who does not have the player’s best interests in mind could strip the avatar of his or her Linden dollar holdings. If you are a Second Life involver, a could idea would be to have a backup plan for your business, jsut in case a glitch does cause you to lose everything you’ve worked for… Apple has not yet released a fix for QuickTime as of this writing to negate this problem.
