Stage

OurStage lets bands compete to win prizes

I tend to be skeptical of "battle of the bands" contests in the physical world. There's often an entry fee to participate, which basically means bands are paying to play in some sort of showdown showcase. Often there's no quality gate--if you can afford the entry fee, you're in, and that means that the only people in the audience are other participating bands. The prizes tend to be loaded with catches, like a "recording contract" that forces you to sign over your publishing rights to the organization sponsoring the contest.

But it appears … Read more

Under the Radar: Eye candy that's actually useful

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The Web has come a long way. The aesthetic of a site can oftentimes determine whether or not a wary user will dig deeper and explore your site. The four companies below offer some of the most beautiful products shown off Tuesday at the Under the Radar social media and entertainment conference, but are they really useful? For the most part, yes. Read more about them below.

Animoto, one of my colleague Elinor Mills' favorite slideshow tools and as CEO Brad Jefferson calls it "The end of the slideshow" (in the boring, stodgy sense, of … Read more

The 404 107: Where Wilson couldn't make it

Randall Bennett subs in for the Tang and we chat about the late Sydney Pollack, the weekend box office, landing on Mars, and the ridiculous Rock Band accessories you can blow your hard-earned cash on. EPISODE 107 Download today's podcast

Paramount exec: Face mapping can jump-start online ads

LOS ANGELES--A Paramount Pictures executive added to the chorus of positive reviews for Big Stage's face-mapping technology during the Digital Hollywood conference on Tuesday.

Derek Broes, Paramount Pictures executive vice president of worldwide business development, was asked during a panel discussion about what interesting new technologies he's seen.

Broes said he was impressed by Big Stage and the start-up's system for manipulating digital recreations of a person's face. The company snaps three photographs of someone's face and processes the photos on its servers to create a digital model of the face. It can then make … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 679: Unhack my Heart

EPISODE 679

Time Warner CEO addresses Yahoo-AOL talk http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9891145-7.html

YouTube opens up for developers http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9891790-7.html http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=yFlR6EEySg8

No punitive damages in YouTube case http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080311-judge-to-viacom-no-punitive-damages-in-youtube-case.html

Did DivX close Stage6 to duck copyright litigation? http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9891761-7.html

Hackers claim to unlock iPhone 2.0 http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143361-c,iphone/article.html

A Heart Device Is Found Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/business/12heart-web.html

Intel $100 Nettop is … Read more

Did DivX close Stage6 to duck copyright litigation?

DivX, parent company of defunct video-sharing site Stage6, on Tuesday disclosed how it came to the decision to shutter the service rather than to sell.

"Potential copyright litigation" was one of management's top considerations leading up to the shuttering of Stage6, Dan Halvorson, DivX's chief financial officer, said during a conference call to announce the public company's fourth-quarter earnings. There was reason for concern. Turns out DivX, a maker of Internet-video technologies, had lost a bid to avoid fighting costly copyright suits just a few weeks before Stage6 was closed, records show.

Halvorson almost certainly … Read more

Brad Greenspan miffed over thwarted attempts to acquire Stage6

Brad Greenspan, the highly unpredictable MySpace cofounder, continues to go after distressed Web video sites.

Fresh from acquiring troubled video site Revver, Greenspan said in a press release on Friday that he recently made an $11 million bid to acquire video-sharing site Stage6, operated by DivX. The problem is that the DivX board never responded to his offer before simply shutting down Stage6. Greenspan's miffed.

"After LiveUniverse makes its first offer, DivX Board refuses to engage in any direct dialogue with LiveUniverse for over 5 days," according to the release issued by Greenspan's company Live Universe. &… Read more

Video host Stage6 shutting down in 72 hours

Divx's pet video hosting project Stage6 will be discontinuing operations Thursday, Feburary 28. The service let users put up their Divx-encoded videos and make them available in high quality for other users to watch and comment on. Already uploads have been discontinued, and the site will simply cease to exist on Thursday--taking all the user videos with it.

Tom Huntington, the Divx employee who posted the closure announcement on the company blog, wrote the service was simply costing the company too much money:

As Stage6 grew quickly and dramatically (accompanied by an explosion of other sites delivering high quality … Read more

You can star in a famous band's music video

STANFORD, Calif.--If you've ever wanted to star in a famous band's music video, a start-up called BigStage will soon give you your chance.

Well, not exactly. But BigStage, which is based in Pasadena, Calif., is planning on letting users insert avatar-like images of themselves into a premade music video for an as-yet unnamed--but very famous--band.

The thing that makes this very interesting is that BigStage has developed a system that lets anyone with a digital camera create an extremely realistic avatar by plugging a photo of themselves into what it describes as a fairly easy-to-use interface.

Then, … Read more

CIA technology will map your face

LAS VEGAS-- Intel CEO Paul Otellini's CES keynote was sparkling. In contrast to Bill Gates' pastel portrait of the future, Otellini presented a concrete vision of a personal, reactive Web, and the challenges to creating it (Silicon, Infrastructure, Context, and Interface). For a full rundown, see Dan Farber's writeup on ZDNet.

Intel loves where the Web is going. The more interactive and personal it gets, the more processing power is required and the more new chips Intel sells, for both servers and local workstations. The most interesting (and newest) product that Otellini brought to the stage in his … Read more