Digest

Netflix executives should be whooping it up.

IHS Screen Digest predicts more movie viewing will occur online rather than with DVDs or Blu-ray discs this year. Not only did the research firm say that Netflix's popularity helped fuel Internet film consumption, but it added that the company owns a significant percentage of that growing market.

If the prediction proves true, Netflix should see its share of growth this year. Also, a world where Internet-delivery is king means the company -- the Web's top video-rental service -- should be in a stronger position to negotiate content licenses.

IHS forecasts … Read more

Up to 3.5 million 3D Blu-ray movie discs have been sold in the U.S. since mid 2010, according to a new report from research firm IHS Screen Digest.

Half of these discs were picked up through retailers, while the rest were bundled with 3D TVs, says the study, titled "Life in 3D: BD3D's first year of sales." Furthermore, 507,293 out of 1.75 million retail copies flew off the shelves in 2010 alone, compared with the 363,000 2D editions sold in 2006, the first year the format debuted. (Do note that the Sony-led Blu-ray standard was competing against the HD-DVD camp back then, whereas 3D Blu-ray has cornered the entire 3D movie disc market for home consumers.)

"Once [consumers] have 3D in the home, they love it and are hungry for content, snapping up BD3D movies as soon as they become available," said Jan Saxton, film entertainment senior analyst for IHS. "Sales reached this high level despite the fact that the number of BD3D titles on the market was relatively small compared to non-3D Blu-ray."

The growth could accelerate in the second half of this year, the report says, with the number of 3D Blu-ray titles available expected to reach 93 by the end of 2011.

(Source: Crave Asia)… Read more

RUTLAND, Mass.--The road up to Jordan Dairy Farm here offers a typical New England view of rolling hills, wood-frame houses, and shade trees. Then up on a hill, there appears a dome-capped silo, a structure that's bringing renewable energy to agriculture.

The silo-like building is an anaerobic digester, one of five that will be installed at small dairy farms here in western Massachusetts. If they perform as hoped, they will allow these farmers to reduce their wastes and make some money in the process. They will also recycle food residue that would normally be thrown away.

The digester, … Read more

Harvest Power, which converts organic waste into energy and soil fertilizer, today said it raised $51.7 million in a funding led by an investment company co-founded by Al Gore.

Generation Investment Management, started by Gore and David Blood as a firm focused on sustainability, will be the lead investor in Harvest Power's series B round. Also participating are existing investors Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Waste Management, Munich Venture Partners, and TriplePoint Capital.

Three-year-old Harvest Power specializes in extracting valuable products from organic waste, such as food scraps and yard clippings. It uses different techniques either to generate … Read more

Where most people see a pile of leftovers or yard waste, Paul Sellew sees a revenue stream, delivering energy and valuable nutrients.

Sellew is the CEO of 3-year-old Harvest Power, a company formed to take recycling to the next level. Paper, metals, and plastics account for about 60 percent of municipal solid waste. The next hill to climb is waste that originally came from the ground: wood, yard trimmings, and now food scraps, which altogether are more than 30 percent of that waste stream.

"We look at it as next-generation solar," said Sellew. "We're capturing sunlight … Read more

Read It Later's new trick is one that long-time users with little time to waste are likely to enjoy. The bookmarking service, which was designed to help people organize and view bookmarks from multiple computers, is launching (in beta) a "digest" that will convert a person's bookmarks into a news page that's sorted by category.

A few years ago this could have been considered a simple exercise in machine tagging. Where Digest does things a bit differently is to automatically create these categories based on what people are saving, so say you never bookmarked stories … Read more

Bill and Steve Gill have gone from onion farmers to power producers.

Their company, Gills Onions of Southern California, on Friday will take the wraps off a system that converts up to 300,000 pounds a day of agriculture waste into electricity. At an event at its facility, Gills Onions will receive a check for $2.7 million from SoCal Gas, which offers incentives to customers that reduce natural gas consumption through on-site generation.

One of the main components of the system is an anaerobic digester that converts treated onion plant waste into biogas. That gas is then conditioned and … Read more

Besides kimchi and tear-jerking dramas, Koreans are exporting creatively hacked cameras. While on vacation, Taeyoon Choi had a flash of brilliance when he saw that his shots looked no different from those taken by other tourists. With some tinkering, he fitted a point-and-shoot into Charlie, his "Magical Image Digesting Duck."

As with any good inventions, there is more to Charlie than meets the eye. Hooked up to the shooter is a vacuum cleaner, printer, and MP3 player. All the devices are linked to a central controller that handles the automated operations of the robotic waterfowl.

Charlie follows Choi … Read more

The preholiday, pre-CES season is upon us, which means lots of announcements and rumors but not necessarily any physical products. For example, Dell CTO Kevin Kettler took advantage of his stage time at Oracle OpenWorld to demo the Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC, which he said will ship in the next few months. Alienware confirmed that it will be announcing its redesigned Area-51 m15x and m17x laptops on Monday and sent along some teaser photos to whet our appetites. Deeper in the rumor mill we found tales of an ultraportable MacBook as well as an Eee PC with a 10-inch screen, … Read more