Music video website Vevo sent an email to its users today announcing that they will soon be required to log into Vevo.com using Facebook, The Next Web reports.

The news brings back speculation that Vevo could move from YouTube to Facebook. Vevo’s contract with Google lasts another year, but a possible deal with Facebook could result in an ad revenue sharing model similar to what Google and Vevo have now. A partnership could help Facebook monetize and give it another advantage over Google. Vevo would likely benefit from getting a higher cut of advertising. It currently gives Google 35 percent.

The email to Vevo users says a new version of the site is coming March 9. At that point, all accounts must be connected with Facebook. Streaming service Spotify is another music platform that recently switched to Facebook-only login. The Spotify app has quickly reached 15.9 million monthly active users, according to our AppData traffic tracking service. Vevo’s Facebook app has only 390,000 MAU, but most people access Vevo videos through YouTube, not Vevo.com.

Vevo.com has full Open Graph integration. When users watch music videos, stories are automatically shared to Ticker, Timeline and News Feed. The site incorporates Like buttons and Facebook comments. Google-owned YouTube does not. YouTube also doesn’t require users to log in. But by getting users to watch more videos on Vevo.com or a new Facebook app, Vevo can provide users with more personalized experiences and collect more data about its audience.

We analyzed what future a partnership between Facebook and Vevo would do for the social network here.

Image credit: The Next Web

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Vevo to require users to have Facebook account to register

As efforts to save the spotted owl seem to be failing, the government is getting ready to try some experimental forestry to keep the species alive. Apparently the scientific approach is to hunt down the owl’s competition and let the loggers in. In other words: There are some hard times ahead for the barred owl. More »

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The Drastic Plan to Save the Spotted Owl By Massacring Other Owls and Trees [Science]

Are employees at Apple already using the so-called iPad 3—possibly running iOS 6—to surf the Web ahead of its expected announcement on March 7? We’re not sure, but the Ars magic 8-ball says “signs point to yes.”

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iPads using iOS 6, high-res displays showing up in Ars server logs

These days, there are more ways to keep time than ever before: our cell phones automatically update themselves through wireless networks; our computers keep sync with atomic clocks; even our cars, ovens and television sets keep track of and tell us the time.

Nevertheless, the watch endures as a classic icon of style, and it’s thrilling to see how companies are trying to innovate on this very analog device in an increasingly digital world.

A recent post on Boingboing tipped me off to a fabulous new watch making the rounds online. With a steampunk-esque belt design, Devon’s Tread watches rely on a system of belts, motors and pulleys to show the time. Like the NOOKA clocks I reviewed earlier, it diverges from the usual circle format, instead separating the minutes, hours and seconds into separate visualizations.

Part of the secret sauce in the watch’s formula is how its powered. Most watches today rely on kinetic energy or a standard battery (and some aficionados still rely on wind-up). Devon’s Tread runs on a their lithium polymer rechargeable cell that charges via wireless induction. According to the extensive manual (online as a PDF), you simply need place it in its futuristic display box and it begins charging.

(more…)

Originally posted here:
A Steampunk Watch Powered by Wireless Induction

New submitter Ogi_UnixNut writes “In Venice, Italy, physicists have shown that it is possible to use two beams of incoherent radio waves, transmitted on the same frequency but encoded in two different orbital angular momentum states, to simultaneously transmit two independent radio channels. In principle this allows the implementation of an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth, even without using polarization, multiport or dense coding techniques. It’s potentially a boon for congested spectrum problems, although at the moment I suspect it would only work for directional links.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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'Twisted' Waves Could Boost Capacity of Wireless Spectrum

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“Everybody was bear-fu fighting/ those swings were fast as lightning.” I don’t know about you guys, but I certainly wouldn’t want to take on this master martial artist.

Via Cute Overload

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This Bear Is A Master Kung-Fu Fighter

This is, by a wide margin, the funniest thing you will see on the Internet today. The great cartoonist Caldwell Tanner has made a Choose Your Own Adventure Novel for those of you who dream of the excitement of office life. The Boss wants his document yesterday. Why haven’t you printed it? There are thirty pages and six possible endings to this story. See if you can survive.

Link -via Super Punch

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Choose Your Own Adventure: A Day at the Office

In his first extensive interview since leaving a New Zealand prison on bail, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (read our in-depth profile) describes himself as a family man with a “big kid inside me” who is looking for “happiness and nature and peace” for his family. Sure, he used to drive in crazy road races and style himself “Dr. Evil” and hire lavish yachts, but those days are a decade behind him now.

It’s a far cry from the way he has been depicted by US law enforcement. They charged the “Mega conspiracy” in January with some of the most heinous criminal copyright violations on the planet. The sit-down interview with New Zealand journalist John Campbell gave Dotcom a chance to dispel this image and make the case his company really is just like YouTube.

It’s not a hard-hitting interview—featuring questions like “Are you as bad as possible, Kim? Are you a very naughty man…?”—but hearing directly from Dotcom at last is fascinating.

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Megaupload takedown a “death sentence without trial,” says Kim Dotcom

There has been talk of the years of haptics technologies which would allow us to move our hand over a glass touchscreen and be tricked into thinking we were touching a fuzzy material, or some rough surface. But that was all R&D talk. At Mobile World Congress this year, however, AllThingsD found a pair of companies who have put that haptic feedback tech into functioning prototype devices. More »

Excerpt from:
Oh My God There Are Real, Functioning Smartphones That Can Make You Think You’re Touching Grass and Rocks [Guts]

Full disclosure: I fell asleep about a half hour into my first attempt to play Journey, the latest experience from Flower creators thatgamecompany. I’m not entirely sure this wasn’t the intended effect of the endless stretches of lonely desert sands and dirge-like music that characterize the beginning of the game. Whatever the intention, there was something about the main character’s relentless plodding towards far off ruins that relaxed me to the point of unconsciousness.

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Journey: A hauntingly beautiful art house film disguised as a game