Get ready for a new version of virtual reality.
Users soundly rejected so-called 360 degree technology in the 1980s when it first appeared in the form of data gloves and head-mounted displays. But now the technology has taken a big leap forward and two companies are launching it anew.
EffectiveUI and Intelligence Gaming are launching an immersive, 360-degree video technology that makes you feel like you’re really inside a video environment. You can look at your environment via a computer display or wear a display that covers your eyes for a wrap-around experience.
The interactive videos essentially make you feel like you’re in the middle of a live action movie. You can interact and change the course of the event. The video technology uses version 10 of Adobe’s Flash technology, which now has “binaural audio.” Binaural video is technology that lets you listen to sounds and detect the physical position of the sound, like footsteps coming closer. That technology fits well with the videos, giving them a far more realistic feel.
Intelligence Gaming will use the technology to create a realistic military simulation which the Army can use to train soldiers headed for Iraq. The company has created the first episode of the simulation, where soldiers question villagers and have to be on the watch for possible suicide bombers coming from any direction.
EffectiveUI is a Denver, Colo.-based interactive agency formed in 2005 with 50 employees and more than 30 clients, including 15 Fortune 1,000 companies. Anthony Franco, president of the company, said the experience is much more realistic than than that provided by previous technologies.
The underlying technology is called RealityV and Intelligence Gaming’s product is called “Immersive Cultural Simulation Product” which the Armyh will use to prepare soldiers for deployment in the Middle East. The simulations give soldiers a feel for hostile situations on foreign soil where understanding what someone is trying to say can make the difference between life or death. At the end of each video scene, the video stops and the user has to answer a question. Depending on the answer, a different outcome will result.
The company is using live action films of real actors because computer-generated avatars, or human characters, aren’t realistic enough to convey things such as smiles, body language or subtle gestures. RealityV is one of the first commercial solutions that makes use of the Adobe Flash Player 10, using 360 degrees of video and eight channels of binaural audio. The companies will show off the technology at the upcoming Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco Nov. 16 to Nov. 19.
The companies said that Intelligence Gaming plans to use the RealityV technology for other virtual reality training simulations as well as possible games. They will essentially replace more crude training simulations that use ordinary videos.
Flash Player 10, the latest version of Adobe’s nearly ubiquitous platform for web video and applications, is now available to the general public. The new features — most of them were already part of the test version released in May — include easier-to-use 3D effects and additional text options that could expand Flash’s international reach.
The new player incorporates the Adobe Pixel Bender toolkit, which adds a bunch of motion filters and effects. Flash Player 10 also makes it easy to take a two-dimensional image and animate it in three dimensions. The animations I’ve seen are a bit cheesy, but product marketing manager Tom Barclay says it makes it much easier to create 3D effects, thus making 3D available to a wider range of developers.
Adobe put me in touch with Tim Barber, the founder of design studio Odopod (which incorporates Flash into most of its content). While Barber hasn’t had a chance to build anything with Flash Player 10 yet, he says his team is excited to play with the graphics improvements.
“It just breaks down a lot of barriers for visual effects and the kind of richness and experiences we try to pursue,” Barber says.
Meanwhile, greater customizability of text — like the ability to run it vertically or right-to-left — seems like a basic addition, but Barclay says the difficulty in displaying anything other than non-standard-for-English text layouts has contributed to limiting Flash adoption in some countries.
And yes, there are some features that weren’t available in the initial beta test. Most notably, Adobe has added tools that enable the audio effects that create a greater range of synthetic sounds.
The release comes about a day after Microsoft’s competing platform Silverlight 2 left testing. Silverlight may have gotten more attention recently because it provided the technology for online streaming of video from the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention, but Barclay and product manager Justin Everett Church say they aren’t too concerned. The numbers back them up on this — Adobe says it reaches 98 percent of Internet-enabled computers, while Microsoft was just touting market penetration of 25 percent.
In fact, Barclay says, all the marketing dollars Microsoft pumps into promoting Silverlight actually helps Adobe too, since it promotes awareness of all rich Internet media and applications. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it certainly doesn’t seem like Adobe has much to worry about.
The stock market took a plunge again today. While it wasn’t quite as bad as Monday’s free-fall, the Dow fell 348.22 points (3.22 percent), the Nasdaq fell 92.68 points (4.48 percent) and the S&P 500 fell 46.78 points (4.03 percent). Not good.
Some of the major tech stocks, which took massive hits on Monday, only to partially recover on Tuesday, fell one again. Two in particular, Apple and Yahoo hit new lows today, while Google didn’t fare much better.
Apple’s stock now stands at $100.10-per-share. It hit the $100.00 mark today but avoided falling below it. The stock fell over 8 percent.
How bad has Apple’s fall been? Just look at the chart below. It looks like the Mariana Trench. While Apple hovered around the $180-a-share mark for much of August, September was brutal on the company. Now October is turning out to be even worse so far.
Apple’s stock has not been at the $100-a-share level since late April/early May 2007. That was during a time of amazing growth for the stock. By the end of 2007 it had surpassed the $200-a-share level. A correction followed in early 2008, but the stock went back up shortly thereafter. Now, it appears in rough waters after several analyst downgrades.
Another stock that fell in the 8 percent range today was Yahoo. It now stands at $15.58-a-share. The stock has not been this low since mid-2003 — yes, five years ago.
Yahoo’s market cap is now $21.59 billion. That’s significant because it’s almost exactly half of the $44.6 billion offer Microsoft made in the beginning of this year to buy the company, as AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher notes. It sounds like the perfect time for Microsoft (which fell much less than its tech counterparts in trading today) to swoop in for a half-off sale, right?
Wrong, say Microsoft sources close to Swisher. Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer was apparently so put off by the whole ordeal of trying to acquire Yahoo the first time around that he says he isn’t going to make an offer no matter what happens.
But as the saying goes: Never say never.
Everyone has a price, and Yahoo’s is getting cheaper by the day. If Microsoft is really serious about remaining relevant in the Internet game, it’s going to have to make a move for Yahoo sooner or later — no matter how Ballmer personally feels about it.
Some other stocks that took big hits today: Google fell $21.21 (5.15 percent), Sun fell $0.58 (7.74 percent), eBay fells $1.70 (8.15 percent) and Adobe fell 2.90 (7.61 percent).
[top photo: flickr/arainman]
It finally looks like Adobe’s Flash platform, which powers YouTube and many other media-rich websites, has really, truly been confirmed for the iPhone. Kind of.
Adobe has been releasing hints about this in dribs and drabs for most of this year. During an earnings call in March, chief executive Shantanu Narayen confirmed that his company wants to develop an iPhone version of Flash — but when a number of bloggers (like me) jumped on the news, Adobe was quick to emphasize that everything was still preliminary. At the next earnings call, in June, Narayen said the company had a version of Flash working on an iPhone emulator on their computers.
Today, Senior Director of Engineering Paul Betlem told attendees at the Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton that his team is indeed working on Flash for the iPhone — not exactly huge news given what Adobe has already said, but still worth noting as additional confirmation. (In that respect, Flash Magazine does seem to be overstating the statement’s importance.) More interestingly, Betlem also said that if Apple approves the software, it could be available “in a very short time.”
And that, of course, is where questions remain. Initially, bringing Flash to the iPhone seems like a no-brainer — it enriches the phone’s web browsing experience by allowing users to access more sites (the Skyfire browser for the Windows Mobile and Symbian mobile platforms is great at this), and it seems to address Apple chief executive Steve Jobs’ concern that there needs to be a middle ground between wimpy mobile platform Flash Lite and the too-heavy demands of regular Flash. But there’s been a lot of talk about how Apple is resistant to Flash and would rather see more “open” apps that are not limited to either Flash or Microsoft’s competing platform Silverlight, so it’s not entirely clear what Apple will do. (Yes, we’re talking about how Apple could use the iPhone’s “closed” nature to push for a more “open” web. Somebody call the irony police.) Still, it’s hard to imagine that Adobe would have spent months working on this without positive encouragement from Apple.
The other question is what form the Flash support would take if approved? AppleInsider implies that it would be a downloadable application in the App Store. But it seems to me Flash would only be useful if it’s closely integrated with the iPhone’s Safari browser, rather than just another standalone app — the whole point is to make more of the web accessible during normal browsing. Maybe that’s another reason for Apple’s hesitation. Apple would have to release a new version of its mobile Safari for that to happen — it is working on a new version for the iPhone in version 2.2 of its OS, but Flash is nowhere to be seen in it.
[Photo from Warner Bros.' film The Matrix, which is also where I got the headline]
TellMe, a voice-recognition software company is at work on an application for Apple’s iPhone. This in and of itself may not be surprising, except that TellMe is owned by Apple nemesis Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft, at least by extension, is developing on the iPhone.
But we’ve actually known that would probably be the case for a while now. Back in March, the software giant indicated its interest in getting its popular office suite applications, Microsoft Office, on the iPhone. It is a growing platform after all, and Microsoft has to fend off Google Docs which is available on the device — and other mobile devices — by way of the Internet. At the time, TellMe specifically said it hoped to get its software on the iPhone sooner rather than later, the company told Fortune.
But as with all things regarding Microsoft and Apple, time is always an issue. “I’m not sure we can squeeze it out this year given everything we’ve got going on,” TellMe senior director Dariusz Paczuski told CNET’s Ina Fried yesterday. He went on to say that iPhone users can expect an app sometime before the end of the current fiscal year — which ends in June…2009.
So sometime in the next nine months, Microsoft’s TellMe will have an app ready to go. Uh, this is an iPhone app and not a baby, right? What the hell could possibly take so long?
CNET notes some “challenges” presented by the iPhone for TellMe, including the fact that it has a touch screen rathe than buttons. Come on, are you serious? Every other application seems to get around that issue just fine.
While I’m sure Microsoft has TellMe working on many other things more related to its business, by the time this app comes out, there could already be another version of the iPhone ready to launch. One with new features that could screw up development of this app.
Even when Microsoft has a team only dedicated to developing for the Mac — as it does with the MacBU team, it takes them forever to get something done. The team’s version of Microsoft Office was one of the — if not the — last application to be made Universal (meaning it would run on both the old PowerPC and the new Intel chips Apple users). Far more complex programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop were made Universal months before.
So Microsoft is working on an iPhone app, which is cool, but as with all things between them and Apple, it’s going to take some time.
Genomatica creates renewable chemical from sugar water — While most chemicals are petroleum-based, several startups are trying to create new alternatives. One of the first to succeed is Genomatica, which says it has a cheap process to make 1,4-butanediol, a component chemical of many common materials, from sugar and water, potentially disrupting a $4 billion industry. More on Genomatica’s process here.
Gaming becoming ubiquitous — A national survey showed that almost all teens play games.
MySpace Music may get another delay — The launch of MySpace’s online music store will likely be pushed back a week or more, yet again. For a laugh, check out our coverage from way back in April, when this launch was expected to happen within five days.
Windows 7 coming along — Microsoft, on the other hand, is shattering expectations by actually hitting its deadlines. Development of Windows 7, the replacement for the unfortunate affair known as Vista, is reportedly humming along, with a potential delivery date as soon as the end of 2009.
Lehman’s venture arm may live — Failed investment bank Lehman Brothers may not drag its venture unit to the grave with it, according to peHUB.
New game advertising startup launches — Worlds and Games, a stealth-mode San Francisco startup by two gaming veterans, is launching today with a focus on advertising in and around games. GameDaily has an interview.
Houses approves cleantech credits, offshore drilling — A bill allowing both offshore drilling and an extension of the Federal cleantech investment credit has passed the House of Representatives. However, it still has to pass muster in Senate, an undertaking similar bills have failed before.
Khosla talks down fashion-based cleantech — The cleantech investor disparaged some of today’s most popular alternative energy icons at a recent talk, including solar panels, the Pickens Plan, and the Prius.
Adobe profits down, but not out — The software giant’s quarterly profits fell seven percent, yet beat the Street’s expectations. Acrobat and LiveCycle drove profits, according to the company.
WebMD buys QualityHealth owner for $50M — Online health firm WebMD has shelled out $50 million for Marketing Technology Solutions, a venture-backed company that owns health information portal QualityHealth.com.
The Linux version of Adobe AIR, a platform for developing and running Internet applications that run on your desktop, is now available in beta testing mode. That means Adobe is getting closer to a full launch of AIR on the Linux operating system, and also to its goal of making AIR a platform for truly ubiquitous “build once, run anywhere” applications.
AIR keeps pushing ahead and making itself more attractive to developers, while competing platforms like Sun’s JavaFX and Mozilla’s Prism are still in development or testing. I have to admit, after talking up the platform when it launched in March, I don’t actually use any AIR applications regularly, but I’ve been hearing about some good ones. For example, Twhirl, a desktop interface for micro-messaging service Twitter was recently acquired by video startup Seesmic.
AIR launched with PC and Mac compatibility, so Linux was the biggest remaining hole. An early, alpha test version became available in March, but the latest release is more complete. Adobe says the only missing pieces of functionality are badge installations (basically, buttons for installing an AIR app) and digital rights management. And in the case of the missing DRM — the technology that restricts the use of certain software and content for copyright protection — I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
The Linux version of Adobe AIR, a platform for developing and running Internet applications that run on your desktop, is now available in beta testing mode. That means Adobe is getting closer to a full launch of AIR on the Linux operating system, and also to its goal of making AIR a platform for truly ubiquitous “build once, run anywhere” applications.
AIR keeps pushing ahead and making itself more attractive to developers, while competing platforms like Sun’s JavaFX and Mozilla’s Prism are still in development or testing. I have to admit, after talking up the platform when it launched in March, I don’t actually use any AIR applications regularly, but I’ve been hearing about some good ones. For example, Twhirl, a desktop interface for micro-messaging service Twitter was recently acquired by video startup Seesmic.
AIR launched with PC and Mac compatibility, so Linux was the biggest remaining hole. An early, alpha test version became available in March, but the latest release is more complete. Adobe says the only missing pieces of functionality are badge installations (basically, buttons for installing an AIR app) and digital rights management. And in the case of the missing DRM — the technology that restricts the use of certain software and content for copyright protection — I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
The spectrum of mobile web strategies is coming into focus at the CTIA this week in San Francisco. After listening to some of the big players talk about their strategies, the divisions between the companies are becoming clear and the question is: Which approach will succeed?
Yahoo
Yahoo showed its cards at the keynote speech Wednesday by Marco Boerries, head of Yahoo Mobile. Yahoo has some major mobile applications. OneSearch handles search. OneConnect ties the phone to social networking accounts. And in the future, OnePlace will connect the user to location services. So clearly, creating a suite of mobile applications that can run on any web-enabled phone is a significant focus of theirs.
But Yahoo went a step further this week in announcing Blueprint, which is the foundation for its applications. It is a middleware platform, based on the XML standard, that allows developers to write applications that can run on thousands of web-enabled cell phones, regardless of carrier or phone maker. Blueprint handles tasks such as rendering, or displaying the application in the correct way on phones with different-size screens. That sounds a lot like what Sun’s Java environment was supposed to do: “write once, run anywhere.” But the reality of Java was that it required developers to do a lot of work tailoring applications for certain phones, said Marc Davis, chief scientist at Yahoo Connected Life, in an interview after the keynote.
Yahoo put a stake in the ground with Blueprint. While others are trying to get PC applications to run on phones, Davis said Yahoo believes developers should architect their mobile applications to run on cell phones from the ground up — not repurpose PC apps.
Adobe
By contrast, that’s exactly what Adobe wants to do. Shantanu Narayen, chief executive of Adobe, used his keynote today at CTIA to describe the evolution of the PC software industry and how common standards enabled the Internet to take off. That same sort of standardization should help demand for mobile web apps.
Adobe believes that ease of development means taking what people already know — how to make applications for the desktop — and figuring out how to painlessly adapt that to mobile phones. He showed how a music playback application, Fine Tune, written in Adobe’s Flash environment can run on either the web, desktop PC or a mobile phone. Narayen said that Adobe is putting energy into tools such as Adobe Device Central to make sure that the apps run across all sorts of phones. It has also formed a consortium, the Open Screen Project, with lots of developers, media companies, hardware makers and carriers on board. Members include Intel, Qualcomm, NTT Docomo, Nokia, MTV and others.
Microsoft isn’t a member of that group. It has its own competing technologies, such as the Windows Mobile operating system, which ensures app compatibility with Windows for desktops. And it has its own new competitor to Adobe’s Flash, dubbed Silverlight. Applications developed for Silverlight can run on a variety of desktop and mobile platforms.
With Android, Google has made the argument that middleware tools just aren’t enough. The operating system has to be tailored to run mobile web applications as well. Google wants its applications to run across a lot of different phones, from simple to high-end models. It also wants developers to produce an open, Linux-based platform that has a common infrastructure. It wants enough variety in the Android platform to satisfy all sorts of third-party developers, but it also wants to ensure an app will run on all Android phones. And it believes that an app running on a platform natively will ensure fast speed.
Nokia
By contrast, Nokia has gone a couple of directions itself. At first, it tried to attract a bunch of partners to its Symbian operating system, which was set up to make sure that Microsoft didn’t dominate the mobile web. Symbian is certainly older than Android, but it runs on a ton of phones. And now Nokia has acquired all of it again, making a bet that desiging its own hardware and its own operating system will result in the best platform for mobile developers.
Apple
Then there is Apple, which has the enormously successful iPhone platform. It isn’t here at CTIA, but its go-it-alone strategy is well known. Apps developed for the iPhone’s App Store have to be written the way that Apple wants. Its software on the iPhone shares a lot of commonalities with the Mac OS for the desktop. But Apple isn’t as interested in interoperability with tons of other phones or carriers. So far, it is incredibly successful. But it remains to be seen where the army of developers will throw their efforts. Does it make sense to develop for the iPhone while it has fewer than 10 million units, or should developers stick with Nokia’s Symbian platform with hundreds of millions of customers?
Other platforms
Then there are developers such as Mytopia who roll their own. The cell phone game company looked around for a development platform a couple of years ago and it decided to do its own. Since games are demanding applications, Mytopia needed something that was fast, but it also wanted to make its games cross platform so that someone in a poker game on a PC could play against another player on a cell phone, said Guy Ben-Artzi, chief executive of Mytopia. The result is RUGS (real-time universal gaming system), which the company is now considering licensing out to others. Mytopia thus shows the path that other developers can take: developing what they need to make their content work the right way on a lot of platforms.
Adobe has revealed its plans for the latest version of its server software for distributing eBooks, which will be released on September 22 and called Adobe Content Server 4. The most important improvements are the new support for the EPUB format, as well as a pay-as-you-go pricing model that charges based on the number of downloads.
As a consumer, I remain unenthusiastic about eBooks, but then, I can be a Luddite when it comes to books. Adobe trotted out some encouraging statistics on this front, saying that the Association of American Publishers reports steady “double digit” increases in eBook sales, and that eBook sales make up 20 percent of technical publisher O’Reilly Media’s revenue.
And Content Server 4 certainly sounds like an improvement. One of the most promising aspects of eBooks is the ability to read on multiple devices, including your personal computer, specialized readers like Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Digital Reader (Adobe supports the latter) and smartphones. By supporting the “flowing” EPUB format, which can readjust the text depending on your device (as opposed to PDFs, whose format is more locked-in), Adobe is taking advantage of this trend.
The other question is whether digital rights management (DRM) that restricts how books can be used and shared is the way to go. Adobe’s spokespeople argue that the publishing industry is better-suited for DRM than the music industry, where the technology hasn’t been terribly popular — Amazon’s music service, for example, has done well by offering MP3s without DRM. But then, Adobe has a horse in the race, since the big selling point of the Content Server is its management of DRM licenses. It’s worth noting that O’Reilly, one of the success stories that Adobe itself offers as an example, provides its books without DRM.