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Why the Verizon-AOL deal just might work: Mobile video ads are worth a lot

For many onlookers, Verizon’s $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL  this week echoed another multibillion dollar deal—AOL’s own $162 billion acquisition of Time Warner  more than 15 years ago. That deal famously collapsed before the end of the decade. But Verizon’s move may differ because of one salient fact: there’s a ton of money in the video advertising being increasingly  watched  on mobile devices. “AOL was in no position to monetize Time Warner Online properties last time around,” Rebecca Lieb , of the Altimeter Group, told Ars. “Time Warner, in essence, bought what was then an ISP. The thinking was ‘this Internet thing is going to be big,’ but beyond that there was little synergy. This time around, an ISP, Verizon, is buying a former ISP. AOL is no longer an Internet service provider or a portal. It’s an advertising technology company.” From that perspective, the deal makes plenty of sense. Money is in no short supply for Verizon, and the deal costs less than  half of the company’s total profits in 2014 . Beyond that, Verizon has been trying to launch a video service for years now. It wants a slice of the mobile video advertising market, and AOL can help with its new “ONE by AOL” ad platform . AOL’s media properties may have been the topic of debate on Twitter, but over three-quarters of the company’s revenue came from advertising in 2014. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why the Verizon-AOL deal just might work: Mobile video ads are worth a lot

This "Throw and Shoot" Camera is Like a Flying GoPro That Follows You

GoPro’s variety of harnesses let you mount their cameras to your head, chest or even your dog. But a new company has developed a flying camera that you needn’t wear at all. You simply throw the Lily , as it’s called, into the air, where it takes flight and follows you on your adventures. Just over ten inches square, the aluminum and polycarbonate Lily is a dual-camera-equipped quadrotor drone with 20 minutes of flight time.  It hones in on a tracker you wear on your wrist, hovering anywhere from five to 50 feet above your head, and runs a tracking path of your choosing (i.e. follow shot, side shot, Michael-Bay encircling shot).  And it’ll keep up with you as long as you’re moving 25 miles per hour or less. It seems pretty unbelievable: The Lily is expected to retail for $999, but the developers are currently selling pre-orders for just $499. I keep thinking of the applications it could have beyond adventure videography. Given a longer flight time and a workable way to navigate overhead obstacles, a fly-‘n-follow camera could be useful for everything from tracking animals on a farm to less confrontational police pursuits. We’ll have to see how well the device actually works when it begins shipping in February of next year.

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This "Throw and Shoot" Camera is Like a Flying GoPro That Follows You

Facebook ‘Instant Articles’ plug in content from NYT and Buzzfeed

Facebook wants to do for news content what it’s done with native video , and the first bit of self-hosted editorial content (“Instant Articles”) could go live tomorrow. It’s starting with The New York Times and will include Buzzfeed , NBC News and National Geographic if unnamed sources speaking to New York Magazine are to be believed. Apparently NYT ‘s business side is why a deal that surfaced in late March is only coming to fruition now, with CEO Mark Thompson’s push for “the most favorable” terms causing delays. A Wall Street Journal report says The Social Network is offering to let publishers keep 100 percent of the money from ads they sell against an article, or 70 percent if Facebook sells the ad. That bit is incredibly important because without traffic going to, say, nytimes.com , and staying on Facebook instead, a publication could lose its ability to pay the bills and its employees. The big argument seems to be that NYT is working to insulate its million-plus digital subscribers from free content hosted on Zuckerberg’s baby, thus rendering a subscription kind of pointless. Regardless of if this is happening tomorrow or not, we won’t have to wait too long before we find out. Update: That didn’t take long. Facebook’s officially unveiled Instant articles, crowing that the reason for the move is, as rumored, to do with page loads. Publishers have access to traffic and data analytics too, and can tailor articles to use the platform’s features which include tilt-to-zoom high-res images. For now, Instant Articles is exclusive to iPhone users. And the full slate of content partners ( NYT , NatGeo , BuzzFeed , NBC News , The Atlantic , The Guardian , BBC News , Spiegel and Bild ) isn’t available yet, with only the first four on offer at the moment. Two of those, Buzzfeed and NYT , have explanations regarding the hows and whys of the partnerships. The ad and analytics are perhaps the most important news for publishers because they offer similar tools to what they likely already have in place internally. It’s worth noting, however, that when something doesn’t pan out Facebook has a habit of killing it off. Remember Home and Paper ? Yeah, we barely can either. Filed under: Internet , Facebook Comments Via: Poynter Source: Facebook

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Facebook ‘Instant Articles’ plug in content from NYT and Buzzfeed

New York’s getting 500 solar-powered food carts this summer

Street food is an celebrated (and inescapable) facet of New York City culture but many of those gas-fired mobile food stalls aren’t exactly environmentally friendly. “I breathe it in, I get the fumes, I get the smell of the food, ” Don Ward, a Manhattan shoe shiner who works next to a cart, told the Wall Street Journal . “I get home and my clothing smells like gas.” So to help combat air and noise pollution this summer, Queens-based MOVE Systems plans to distribute 500 “green” vendor carts. They’ll be outfitted with solar panels and rechargeable batteries in addition to sinks, refrigerators and grills. The carts, dubbed MRV100 Hybrids, measure roughly 5 feet wide by 10 feet long and reportedly can be adapted to serve a wide variety of cuisine. The program is funded entirely through donations and private partnerships and, as such, MOVE is offering the carts free of charge. 100 of the carts are already earmarked for disabled veterans. There’s no immediate word, however, on how the 400 remaining carts will be distributed among the 3, 000-plus permitted vendors operating in NYC. Either way, Meeks expects the carts to start rolling out by Memorial Day. Filed under: Misc , Transportation Comments Via: Eater NY Source: Wall Street Journal

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New York’s getting 500 solar-powered food carts this summer

Reforestation drones could plant one billion trees a year

Add / Remove Industrial scale deforestation destroys 26 billion trees each year, and while there are a number of initiatives — such as Supply Change and The Rainforest Connection — aiming to lessen this number, startup BioCarbon Engineering is concentrating its efforts on damage control by pioneering drone reforestation. The world currently replants approximately 15 billion trees per year. Hand planting trees, which until now has been the primary method available, is both costly and time-consuming, which explains the worrying shortfall in reforestation. Now, BioCarbon Engineering — led by former NASA engineer Lauren Fletcher — are proposing an alternative: the company plans to plant one billion trees a year, using multipurpose drones. The UAVs will first map the terrain of effected areas and then carry out precision planting of pregerminated seeds. Two operators are expected to employ multiple UAVs, which can shoot the seeds at a rate of 10 pellets per minute, totalling 36,000 trees in a day. The seeds would be covered with a nutritious hydrogel, making them more likely to flourish and BioCarbon Engineering hope to collaborate with local reforestation organizations to ensure they satisfy the biodiversity needs of each region, restoring ecosystems rather than creating fragile monocultures . The startup suggests that their method could cost 85 percent less than traditional methods. Are there other ways that drones could be used in farming and gardening? Website: www.biocarbonengineering.com Contact: lauren@biocarbonengineering.com

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Reforestation drones could plant one billion trees a year

Firefox 38 Arrives With DRM Required To Watch Netflix

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from VentureBeat: Mozilla today launched Firefox 38 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include Digital Rights Management (DRM) tech for playing protected content in the HTML5 video tag on Windows, Ruby annotation support, and improved user interfaces on Android. Firefox 38 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Note that there is a separate download for Firefox 38 without the DRM support. Our anonymous reader adds links to the release notes for desktop and Android. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox 38 Arrives With DRM Required To Watch Netflix

Verizon, Sprint Agree To Pay Combined $158 Million Over Cramming Charges

mpicpp sends news that Verizon has agreed to pay $90 million (PDF), and Sprint another $68 million (PDF), to settle claims that they placed unauthorized charges on their customers’s bills. The process, known as “cramming, ” has already cost T-Mobile and AT&T settlements in the tens of millions as well. Most of the settlement money will go towards setting up refund programs, but Verizon and Sprint will be able to keep 30% and 35% of the fees they collected, respectively. In response to the news, both companies issued vague statements about “putting customers first.” They are now banned from charging for premium text message services and must set up systems to ensure informed consent for third-party charges. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Verizon, Sprint Agree To Pay Combined $158 Million Over Cramming Charges

Could this beautiful game signal the end of our dystopia fetish?

Over the past decade or so, gritty, apocalyptic worlds were the favored setting of popular video games, and machinelike cyber-dystopias were a reliable aesthetic before that. But No Man’s Sky , a highly-anticipated upcoming world, is infinite and hopeful. Read the rest

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Could this beautiful game signal the end of our dystopia fetish?

Ultra HD Blu-ray is bringing high-res movies home soon

After Blu-ray and HD DVD ushered in the age of HD and 1080p movies for the masses, discs were beaten to 4K by streaming services like Netflix , YouTube and Amazon. While the internet is still doing most of the heavy lifting for 4K, the Ultra HD Blu-ray specification is finally complete which means we should see movies and players arriving later this year. Besides being compatible with the 10, 000~ Blu-ray discs already out, Ultra HD Blu-ray players will be ready for high-res 3, 840 x 2, 160 video, “next generation object-based sound formats” (think DTS: X and Dolby Atmos ), more colors, high dynamic range (HDR) and even high frame rate video. That’s a lot of buzzwords to say movies will have the capability to look and sound better at your home than they ever have before. The BDA also made vague reference to a “digital bridge” setup for extending your movie purchased on a disc to other devices like phones and tablets, but didn’t say exactly how that will work, or if it’s going to be any better than Ultraviolet. The discs themselves are upgraded too, ready to hold 66GB or 100GB of data, up from the 25GB/50GB size of the current Blu-ray spec. According to the association licensing is expected to start this summer, and Samsung already announced it plans to release a player later this year. Hopefully, whatever it produces is better (and cheaper) than the slow, glitchy $1, 000 BD-P1000 that kicked off the Blu-ray era years ago. Panasonic showed off a demo player at CES this year, and we’re sure other manufacturers will follow suit. For people looking to future proof their setup, the new crop of Ultra HD TVs hitting shelves this year have support for the high-res video, plus HDR color, but they may need to support a new HDMI 2.0a standard to get the most out of new discs. There’s still a few more questions than answers about the rollout of 4K content, but as the picture clears up over the summer and into the holidays, we should have more information. Filed under: Home Entertainment , HD , Samsung , Sony Comments Source: Blu-ray Disc Association (Businesswire)

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Ultra HD Blu-ray is bringing high-res movies home soon