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Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

Our home as a multiplex cinema?

24 Jan

News came along this week that Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, are buying up Lovefilm – the most successful  popular video-through-the-post service in the UK. Lovefilm have around 1.6 million customers in Europe.

 

Story here and Guardian story here

The way it works is that you go to their web site and make up a list of the films you would like to see. say 30 or so. They will send you a DVD film from the list through the post and as soon as you return that one, the next one is sent.  There are various rental deals depending on how keen a movie watcher you are.

Now with Amazon on board, they hope to break into the video streaming market. There is a catch though, as Sky has contracts to not only broadcast films from the main movie studios, they also own the UK on-demand rights as well. This makes it very difficult for new entrants into the market.

The Competition Commission has now got involved with the whole video on-demand issue to see if the market needs more competition. The decision is still out.

Meanwhile in America video-on-demand is huge, growing at 31% per year.  As a taster of what kind of devices you need to take advantage of this new form of entertainment, have a look at Wired magazine’s review of HDTV media streamers now available in the States.

I think in about 5 to 10 years time, the way we all consume films and entertainment will look very different.

 
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Posted in Entertainment, Impact of ICT, Interesting ICT News

 

‘Disruptive’ technologies for 2011

18 Jan

A ‘disruptive’ technology is one where it suddenly changes the way people do things. For example, for hundreds of years people used a slide rule to calculate, then seemingly overnight in the 1970′s the electronic calculator appeared. Everyone went Wow! and just threw away their old slide rules.

 

A whole industry had to change their ways or disappear. Same thing happened with electronic watches.

The leading technology research firm IDC are prediciting 3 disruptive technologies for 2011.

Going mainstream will be:

  • Web connected TV
  • Mobile devices
  • The ‘cloud’

Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets)

It is predicted that 2011 will be the year when there will be more mobile devices sold than PCs for connecting to the Internet.It will be the end of the PC centred computing experience.And driving this change is the rise of the ‘Apps’. For the first time there will be over a million apps out there compared to only 10′s of thousands of PC applications.

There are over 2 billion people connecting to the Internet now and more than half of them do so through mobile devices.

Web connected televisions.

It is predicted that over half of TVs over 40 inches will have a network connection. And at the other end, many companies are springing up to provide content – the programs – Google TV, Apple TV, Roku and so on.
So entertainment and leisure will shift from terrestial to internet based delivery. A whole industry will begin to change the way it does things and new companies will emerge that threaten the old status quo.

The cloud

This is where companies off-load their expensive IT infrastructure and instead choose to let a cloud company host their applications and data. Over 80% of new software will be cloud based and by 2014 over a third of all software spending will be done for delivery through the cloud.
All the major IT companies are preparing the ground – IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, VMWare, Google. Think of how this will change the IT departments in large companies – no more data centres or hundreds of IT support staff needed to look after things. So the cloud is a technology that changes the way we do things.

Disruptive technologies

 
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Posted in Applications & software, Entertainment, Impact of ICT, Mobile phones, New technology, Social effects of ICT

 

Flipbook – the future of magazines?

02 Jan

It is that time of year again when everyone looks back at the old year and starts making best-of lists. Well we are no different and have been looking at the best App out of 400,000 in the Apple store.

Enter ‘Flipbook’. This is an amazing free application that collects links, articles, images from your twitter feeds, facebook or any other  RSS feed you subscribe to and then cleverly puts it into a beautiful magazine layout for you to ‘flip’ through. It is perfect for the iPad as there is plenty of space to lay out the pages.

It has won the ‘App of the Year’ award from Apple. Wired magazine have also voted it the best in 2010. We have got to agree – there is something fascinating about seeing photos of your friends party from facebook mixed up with interesting tech articles from your RSS subscriptions. And it is never the same twice, as your feeds update.

Perhaps this is the way magazines will go in the future. You subscribe to their feed, then it gets put together with all your other interests into a personal magazine.

Have a good year everyone!

Can be download from here

 

 
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Posted in Applications & software, Entertainment, Social networking, Web 2.0 tools

 

Kodu – a free game making system

08 Dec

Microsoft have made efforts to introduce an educational game-making  system into their popular 360 Xbox machine. It is called Kodu. This is their intro paragraph…

Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing,
building, and playing your own new games. The core of the Kodu
project is the programming user interface. The language is simple
and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions.
Conditions are evaluated simultaneously..

Initially I thought it was a purely Xbox effort according to this link.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/

It has to be more general than that surely?

Kodu game maker

But on that page there is a link on the right hand side that points to a ‘free PC version’

http://fuse.microsoft.com/project/kodu.aspx

This explains in general terms what is is all about. I wanted to see some real-world examples and at the bottom of that page can be found a link

www.planetkodu.com

This takes you to the personal game-making efforts.

On that page I clicked on the first example of a real game called ‘Kudo Turismo’. It was only a 39kb download, so obviously there must be something else needed to support that code. And indeed there was. On the left hand side is a link called Fuse-Labs download which is a 184Mb msi download. The version I downloaded was 1.0.48.0.

I clicked on the msi file and it said I did not have the XNA Framework installed. It offered a link to download and so I clicked on that. The XNA install started and then it wanted to install Directx 9.0c components as well.

Do you ever get the idea that some software is a virtual Matryoshka doll? Each one requiring their own additional bits of software?

After all that, the KoduSetup.msi did install and played the .kodu game I had downloaded. It did hint heavily about the Xbox controls that would drive the game, although the good old keyboard arrow keys also did the job. The graphics and sounds are very good though.

So all in all – it did the job. But the caveat is that you must have the right environment installed on the PC network to support it… Directx 9 -> XNA ->Kodu setup.

If you want to enthuse your students in computing via game-making then perhaps the effort of setting up the right environment might be worth it.

 
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Posted in Entertainment, Software

 

Internet estate agent sells online virtual nightclub for £400,000

18 Nov

Parents and teachers alike tend to berate students for spending (or wasting) time playing computer games.  However, one British entrepreneur has made enough money from playing a computer game that he probably won’t have to work for many years to come.   Jon Jacobs sold a highly sought after virtual nightclub in the online game, Entropia, for £400,000.  Before he decided to sell the virtual property he was earning £124,000 per year from people who ‘visited’ the club and spent money in the shopping centres in the complex.  Although he is undoubtedly now very rich his success didn’t come to him without a personal cost.  Back in 2005 he took an immense risk by taking out a mortgage of £62,000 on his own home in order to fund the purchase of the virtual asteroid upon which he eventually built his nightclub.

This news story could be used to form the basis of a discussion on computer games, entertainment, enrepreneurial skills and risks. 

Read the full story here

 
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Posted in Computer games, Entertainment

 

Will E-books become the norm?

10 Oct

We at Teach-ICT are inveterate gadget geeks – if there is a gadget out there, then eventually we will convince ourselves that we need it.

Take e-books. It started out with getting the Kindle app for the iPad. After playing around with it for a few weeks and downloading some of the free content it seemed to be an ‘ok’ application. For example, after an hour or so, the glare from the back-lit iPad became a strain on the eyes, just like trying to read from a regular screen. The weight of holding up the iPad also becomes tiresome after a while unless you scrunch up your legs to try and support it.

Next we booked a Kindle device from the Amazon store although it was on back-order due to the demand. But eventually it arrived. What a difference, the reflective e-ink technology means no more eye strain as there is only ambient light to illuminate the high contrast screen. It’s dead light so no problem there. It did feel a bit fragile though, so we bought a nice leather wallet to hold it in. Now it feels like a slim leather bound book.

A visit to the copyright-free book section to see what classics could be downloaded revealed old favourites such as Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (just watched the DVD) and The adventures of Sherlock Holmes (just watched the Robert Downey Jr / Jude Law movie).  Now this is interesting. Having watched the movies, there was an urge to read the books once more – is this a trend? Will reading increase now that there is an almost instant link between watching a film adaption and downloading the book? We think so.

After the freebie search, we did buy half a dozen or more books, and this too is interesting. You can create up to a five-member group / family. So if one member purchases a book then the others can download it as well. Again, this does encourage you to read as it has already been paid for. Another advantage is being able to read your books whilst out and about or on holiday, no more expensive luggage excess.

DRM and proprietary company lock-in may be an issue, but we definitely think that e-books are here to stay.

 
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Posted in Entertainment