Showing posts with label Sony. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sony. Show all posts

Monday, January 16, 2023

Turns out Sony owns the creepiest TV patent ever; Creative Bloq, January 15, 2023

 , Creative BlowTurns out Sony owns the creepiest TV patent ever

"Patent filings often offer a tantalising glimpse at what weird and wonderful inventions tech brands have up their sleeves. Whether or not they'll ever come to fruition hardly matters – it's just fun to know that Apple is working on teeth-powered AirPods or Sony wants to make controllers with collapsible joy joysticks. But it turns the latter brand has also filed one of the most dystopian patents we've seen.

The 2009 patent, which has recently resurfaced on social media, describes a form of advertising that we hope never, ever becomes the norm. In it, TV viewers are only able to skip an advert by shouting the name of the brand. Yep, crying 'McDonald's!' is the only way to make the Big Mac disappear. (Check out the best Apple patents for some slightly less terrifying ideas.)"

Sunday, February 6, 2022

The Spider-Man Problem; NPR, Planet Money, January 28, 2022

, NPR, Planet Money; The Spider-Man Problem

"When Marvel licensed the Spider-Man film rights to Sony Pictures in the 1990s, the deal made sense — Marvel didn't make movies yet, and their business was mainly about making comic books and toys. Years later, though, the deal would come back to haunt Marvel, and it would start a long tug of war between Sony and Marvel over who had creative cinematic control for Marvel's most popular superhero."

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Sony patents contact lens that records what you see; CNet, 5/2/16

Michelle Starr, CNet; Sony patents contact lens that records what you see:
"A new patent, awarded to the company in April, describes a contact lens that can be controlled by the user's deliberate blinks, recording video on request.
Sensors embedded in the lens are able to detect the difference between voluntary and involuntary blinks. The image capture and storage technology would all be embedded in the lens around the iris, and piezoelectric sensors would convert the movements of the eye into energy to power the lens.
Of course, at this point, this technology isn't small enough to be comfortably embedded in a contact lens, so it's only theoretical."

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Posting A Parody Video? Read This First.; Library Journal, 11/29/12

Meredith Schwartz, Library Journal; Posting A Parody Video? Read This First: "While Good Morning America’s film crew was at the library, the show received Sony’s statement above, which Good Morning America, the library, or both interpreted to mean that they now had permission to show the video on YouTube and other third party sites, not just the library website. While that interpretation may have been overly broad, it was apparently good enough for YouTube: according to Giannella, the library didn’t have to re-upload the video, it is now available again at the original URL. Ironically, in an instance of the Streisand Effect, the main result of the temporary blockage has been to gain a far bigger viewership for “Read It” than it ever would have had otherwise."

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Ebook entrepreneur Neil Jones takes on the big guys; Guardian, 11/12/09

Katie Allen, Guardian; Ebook entrepreneur Neil Jones takes on the big guys:

"With authors who want to control their own publishing in mind, [Neil Jones] founded Interead and developed the Coolerbooks.com ebook site. He wanted to sell the Sony Reader to accompany the downloads but Sony could not guarantee supply, so he created the Cool-er ereader instead. After a few months in the market, worldwide sales of the Cool-er (which costs £189 in the UK) have soared...

He is confident that his brightly coloured devices, which have been called the iPods of the ebook world, will be number two in America by next autumn in terms of sales, and number one in the UK.

As he takes on the likes of Sony and Amazon – whose Kindle reader launched internationally in October – Jones has been looking into research on David and Goliath battles throughout history. He thinks the odds for the small guy are pretty good. Outside the battlefield, he cites the business example of Virgin Atlantic, currently celebrating its 25th year. "Twenty-five years ago, who would have given Virgin Atlantic any chance against the likes of British Airways?"...

Interead's ebook site recently became the first ebookstore outside the US to offer 500,000 of the public domain books (books that have fallen out of copyright) available from Google Books.

Jones says Interead's latest example of thinking differently is the US retail launch of its reader on the QVC shopping channel. "We know the majority of our market is women – women read more," he says."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/nov/12/small-business-ereaders-neil-jones-profile

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Internet Hating Sony Pictures CEO Insists Piracy Is Killing Movie Business; But Facts Show Otherwise; TechDirt, 10/28/09

Mike Masnick, TechDirt; Internet Hating Sony Pictures CEO Insists Piracy Is Killing Movie Business; But Facts Show Otherwise:

"Ah, remember Michael Lynton? The Sony Pictures CEO who earlier this year insisted that nothing good had come from the internet at all. When everyone started mocking him for this statement, rather than back off, he doubled down and insisted it was true, using examples that were easily debunked. Apparently, he hasn't learned his lesson. He's back at it, pushing for the UK (and others) to pass laws kicking people off the internet (so-called "three strikes" laws) while insisting that due to piracy there's less money to make movies and fewer movies being made. Of course, those are things that can be fact checked, and the folks over at TorrentFreak did exactly that, pointing out that more movies are coming out each year and more money is being made. Oops."

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091027/1255556697.shtml

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

A New Electronic Reader, the Nook, Enters the Market; New York Times, 10/21/09

Motoko Rich, New York Times; A New Electronic Reader, the Nook, Enters the Market:

"As widely expected, Barnes & Noble unveiled its Nook electronic reading device at a splashy news conference on Tuesday to generally positive views from the publishing community, and offered some details about its whispered-about lending capabilities.

The Nook electronic reading device from Barnes & Noble was unveiled Tuesday, offering a competitor to the Kindle.

As much as anything, publishers seemed relieved that Barnes & Noble, which operates the nation’s largest chain of bookstores, had produced a credible alternative to Amazon’s Kindle. The Nook, priced at $259, went on sale Tuesday afternoon at nook.com, at a price that matched the latest edition of the Kindle. The Nook will ship starting in late November.

Amazon currently dominates the market for electronic readers. Estimates vary, but according to the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, Amazon has sold about 945,000 units, compared with 525,000 units of the Sony Reader...

One of the differentiating factors of the Nook is that customers can “lend” books to friends. But customers may lend out any given title only one time for a total of 14 days and they cannot read it on their own Nook while it is lent."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/technology/21nook.html?scp=1&sq=nook&st=cse

E-Book Fans Keep Format in Spotlight; New York Times, 10/21/09

Brad Stone, New York Times; E-Book Fans Keep Format in Spotlight:

"The publishing industry has been under a dark cloud recently.

Sales are down this year, despite prominent books by Dan Brown and Edward M. Kennedy. Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in a war for e-commerce dominance, creating new worries among publishers and authors about dwindling profits.

But amid the gloom, some sellers and owners of electronic reading devices are making the case that people are reading more because of e-books.

Amazon for example, says that people with Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. That factor is up from 2.7 in December 2008. So a reader who had previously bought eight books from Amazon would now purchase, on average, 24.8 books, a rise from 21.6 books.

“You are going to see very significant industry growth rates as a result of the convenience of this kind of reading,” said Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/technology/21books.html?scp=1&sq=e-books&st=cse

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Amazon Kindle 2: Centuries of evolved beauty rinsed away; Guardian, 10/10/09

Nicholson Baker, Guardian; Amazon Kindle 2: Centuries of evolved beauty rinsed away:

This week Amazon announced the UK launch of its latest generation of e-reader. But don't all rush at once, warns one American writer – despite the hype, the Kindle 2 is still no match for the book

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/10/amazon-kindle-uk-launch-book

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Coolerbooks.com gets 1M books from Google scans; Associated Press, 9/2/09

Rachel Metz via Associated Press; Coolerbooks.com gets 1M books from Google scans:

"Interead, a British company that sells the COOL-ER e-book reader, is adding more than 1 million free public-domain books to its online bookstore. The texts are available from Google Inc. through its book-scanning project.

However, the online store won't be able to show half of the books outside the U.S. because of copyright restrictions, Interead said."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hhYsP5iV7KbmDgpo-bFJ030Q_o0QD9AF6TE80

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books; New York Times, 8/13/09

Brad Stone via New York Times; Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books:

"On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.

Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.

After the change, books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub...

“People need to remember, when they buy books that come with digital rights management, they don’t have the freedoms they normally would have with a book,” said Holmes Wilson, campaigns manger of the Free Software Foundation, which obtained the signatures of nearly 4,000 authors and tech pundits on a petition saying Amazon’s anticopying software was a “clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.”

Companies like Sony and Adobe do not want to abandon anticopying measures, fearing that piracy of books would run rampant. Rather, they want to push the e-book industry toward common standards to avoid a replay of Apple’s domination of the digital music business.

Early this decade, Apple sold music from its iTunes store that was protected by its own FairPlay software and could be played only on the iPod.

The result was what is known as “lock-in.” Apple built up extraordinary market power and leverage to dictate terms to the major music labels on matters like the price of digital songs. Then, as now, second-tier players banded together to promote the increased flexibility and choice that open standards gave to consumers."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/technology/internet/13reader.html?_r=1&hpw

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Sony to Cut E-Book Prices and Offer New Readers; New York Times, 8/5/09

Brad Stone and Motoko Rich via New York Times; Sony to Cut E-Book Prices and Offer New Readers:

"Sony’s price cut on digital books and the new devices may not be enough to help it catch up to Amazon. One significant drawback to Sony’s new devices is that, unlike the Kindle, they cannot connect wirelessly to an e-book store. Owners of Sony Readers must plug their devices into a computer to buy and download books.

The new Readers also cannot access magazines or newspapers, and Sony has yet to develop a version of its reading software for other devices like the iPhone. Mr. Haber from Sony said that the company was working on developing all of these features."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/technology/personaltech/05sony.html?_r=1&hpw

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Judge Bars the Internet From the Courtroom in a File-Sharing Case; Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wired Campus, 4/17/09

Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wired Campus: Judge Bars the Internet From the Courtroom in a File-Sharing Case:

"Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor, had asked to Webcast a court hearing in the case against his client Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University whom Sony BMG Music Entertainment sued for copyright infringement. The presiding federal judge, Nancy Gertner, approved the request in January. But the recording industry, fearing that the hearing in U.S. District Court in Boston would become a circus, appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Today, that court barred the Webcast, which was to be recorded by the Courtroom View Network and carried gavel to gavel by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Judicial rules close federal courtrooms in Massachusetts to all forms of broadcasting, including Webcasting, Judge Bruce M. Selya wrote in the ruling."

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3720&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Sony Reaches Deal to Share in Google’s E-Book Library , The New York Times, 3/18/09

Via The New York Times: Sony Reaches Deal to Share in Google’s E-Book Library:

"Aiming to outdo Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle.

Since 2004, Google has scanned about seven million books from major university and research library collections. For now, however, Google can make full digital copies available only of books whose copyrights have expired...

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has said that works in the public domain, like those Google is making available to Sony, are easy to get since there are no copyrights attached.

Google has been working to encode books in a free, open electronic publishing format, ePub, which makes them easier to read on devices like the Reader. The company is aiming to gradually increase the number of copyright-free books in the Google Book Search catalog available to Sony and any other e-book distributor that shares its goals of making books more accessible."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/technology/19sony.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=copyright&st=cse

Monday, December 22, 2008

Warner Music videos removed from YouTube, Los Angeles Times, 12/21/08

Via Los Angeles Times: Warner Music videos removed from YouTube:

"Warner Music Group's videos began disappearing from YouTube this weekend, the casualty of a contract impasse between the music company and the Internet's dominant video site

Negotiations broke down last week over licensing fees for Warner's music and videos, say people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

On its blog, YouTube alerted its audience to the collapse in talks, noting that professionally produced music videos and those that fans create using Warner songs would begin to disappear...

The stalled discussions suggest that Warner is dissatisfied with the revenue stream it gets from YouTube."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-warner-youtube21-2008dec21,0,6252484.story