Second Life (GigaOm Show)

Phillip Rosedale is the founder and CEO of second life. They talked about HULU is now open to the public. It’s an easy way to watch some of you favorite TV shows. Second life is said to be worldwide. Second Life has more than million registered accounts, although many are inactive, some residents have multiple accounts, and there are no reliable figures for actual long-term consistent usage.
Second Life is considered a 3-D virtual world created by its residents. It opened to the public in 2003, it has grown a great bit, and today has millions of residents.
Wagner James Au (in second life) is the GigOm editor and author of “The Making of Second Life.” Second life is basically an online world, which the people who are there build everything. Second life is now about five years old. It started out with about sixteen severs. The size then was about the six of a few area blocks, and could be explored in about an hour. Now Second life has grown so rapidly there are almost, 18,000 servers. Second life continues to develop, it’s expected that all of second life will not be consumed. They talked about an island which they were currently at, they lady who created this digital ecosystem, profiting from donations left due to frustrations with second life. The question of if second life will survive, it’s now over a half billion dollar economy over a million dollars a day. Phillip Rosedale has stated that his goal with second life is to demonstrate a viable model for a virtual economy or virtual society.

Buzz out loud 675 Piracy

As most know, the MPAA has been claiming that piracy is killing the industry. Actors and Actresses are soon to be losing jobs and indeed the whole movie industry itself is being crushed by piracy. The MPAA just reported it's largest profit ever in 2007, $9,630,000,000 or 9.63 billion dollars( in case you lost count of the zeros). Piracy is obviously not keeping people out of the theater, and as the Buzz Out Loud crew suggested, piracy may even be good to a certain extent. Piracy promotes business as people who see the movie online usually end up buying it or going and seeing it in the theater. The ones who pirate movies and do not buy them would not have seen the movie otherwise, but they will still talk about it, and perhaps others will be interested and actually pay money to see the movie. Also, people do enjoy the whole theater experience of seeing the movie on a much larger screen than any television could provide.
Regardless of rather piracy helps or hurts the movie industry, one thing should be obvious; the MPAA is stretching the truth. Pirating is bigger now than it ever has, yet somehow the MPAA manages to earn more than ever before. One can not help but believe the MPAA might be exaggerating some of their statistics. Actually one does not have to believe as the MPAA has been caught exaggerating the affects of piracy in a 2005 report on collegiate piracy. The MPAA originally stated that the collegiate file sharing contributed to 44% of movie losses to piracy. Later however, it was discovered that collegiate piracy equals about 15% of movie losses! Obviously, someone made a minor error in their calculations. The MPAA will never receive wide-support, regardless of how people feel about piracy, if it does not use legitimate tactics to prove its case.

GigaOm 2/28/08

On the last GigaOm show, Josh Vyomesh, EVP imaging and printing for HP was talking about many technologies that HP/Hewlett Packard is interested in. One that stuck out in my mind was Electronic paper, or E-paper. E-paper is a technology that looks very similar to paper. Unlike other flat displays which utilizes a back light to display the picture. E-paper reflects light like a regular piece of paper. Vyomesh's point was that HP tries to be environmentally friendly and unlike traditional paper, e-paper is not processed from trees and is reusable, so once it has been used, you don't have to archive it or throw it away. The biggest drawback is that e-paper does not display color nearly as well as a traditional ink-jet printer.
E-paper can be used for a variety of things besides emulating traditional paper. Computer screens can be made using E-paper. The difference between these screens and LCDs, CRTs, and Plasmas is that E-paper screens can be worn, are flexible, and can even be rolled up. E-books may be used on E-paper as well. This is a very practical application for E-paper. Many people do not want to sit at a computer screen to read an E-book, yet printing it would take several pages, but an entire e-book could be read using one piece of E-paper. Another interesting use of E-paper is in watches. The entire watch, including the face display, is as flexible as the band when using E-paper. These are just a few of the hundreds of applications for E-paper.
E-paper will most likely become more available in the next few years. Even now, companies are investing heavily into E-paper. The problems right now with E-paper is that the uses, such as clocks and E-book readers are more novel than serious markets. E-paper has the potential to be used in everything from street signs to computer displays however.