Business Tech

Electronic Arts has closed the door on its game developer unit Pandemic Studios.

EA shut down Pandemic as a separate unit on Tuesday, laying off 200 employees, according to published reports, but moving a small core team to EA's Los Angeles headquarters. Those exiting include Pandemic's two founders, Andrew Goldman and Josh Resnick.

An Electronic Arts spokesperson confirmed the news to CNET, but called it a consolidation rather than a closing, saying that the company merged Pandemic with EA's nearby LA campus. The core team of developers integrated into EA will continue to work on Pandemic properties.

An internal memo by EA Games Label Senior Vice President Nick Earl also confirmed the closing, as reported by the Web site Kotaku.

"I want to make it clear that the Pandemic brand and franchises will live on," wrote Earl in the memo. "In the months ahead, we will announce plans for new games based on Pandemic franchises. This type of change can be difficult. But the situation calls for us to act decisively, to take control of our destiny and to run a stronger, more focused development operation. That's how we will continue to make great games in our LA studios."

The EA spokesperson also confirmed that the Pandemic brand and franchise are still alive and well, and that EA is still very committed to it.

Started in 1998, Pandemic Studios was later bought by Electronic Arts in 2007 as part of a deal for which EA paid $860 million for both Pandemic and Bioware. Pandemic is behind the design of many popular titles, including Star Wars: Battlefront, Mercenaries, and Full Spectrum Warrior. The studio's most recent game for EA, The Saboteur, will hit stores next month.

On the plus side, Bioware seems in little danger of closing. With its slew of blockbuster games, such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins (which triggered more than a million downloads of premium content in its initial week), Bioware has proved to be one of EA's more successful studio purchases.

Hit by weak game sales, EA has been hurting since last year when it warned that 2009 would be a tough one. The company said at the time that it would need to cut staff, trim product lines, and close studios. EA initially announced job cuts of 10 percent of its workforce, then later revised that to 11 percent. In January, EA also jettisoned Pandemic's studio in Brisbane, Australia.

Electronic Arts has indeed struggled this fiscal year, announcing higher losses and lower sales for its first quarter and again for the second quarter, ended September 30.

The continued downturn forced the company earlier this month to announce additional job cuts of 1,500 employees beyond the initial 11 percent. With the layoffs scheduled to occur by March of next year, the game maker hopes its actions will trim annual expenses by at least $100 million.

"Laying off employees and closing facilities is never pleasant--we have a lot of compassion for those impacted--but these cuts are essential for transforming our company," said EA CEO John Riccitiello in an earnings call following the announcement of the cuts.

Logitech, a maker of Webcams and other peripherals, said Tuesday it will acquire LifeSize Communications for $405 million in cash. The move puts Logitech into the video conferencing market.

LifeSize offers high-definition video-conferencing systems. LifeSize's customers range from small and medium-size businesses to large companies. I've tested out a few LifeSize systems and found them to be solid systems for the money.

The move by Logitech means that most of the standalone video conferencing players have been acquired. Cisco is planning to buy Tandberg but is having some trouble. And once LifeSize is off the board, Polycom will be the last player standing.

Read more of "Logitech gobbles up LifeSize; Enters video conferencing" at ZDNet.

HP Skyroom software

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

SAN FRANCISCO--Looking to take advantage of tightened corporate travel budgets, Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday showed the latest tech to come out of its labs, called Skyroom.

Unveiled together with Intel at the start of the Intel Developer Forum here, Skyroom is a real-time collaborative video conferencing and whiteboarding tool. HP CEO Mark Hurd hinted at the product when he spoke at Fortune's Brainstorm conference in July.

Skyroom allows colleagues in separate locations to make video calls and share videos, 3D applications, documents, and more in real time. Using an advanced video codec, rich applications and video are compressed and shared over a standard network, and intended to run as smoothly as if they were hosted on the user's local desktop. Cisco offers similar software with its WebEx brand.

Some of the more advanced teleconferencing software used now requires special equipment and often a specific room. Skyroom is supposed to work "more like a phone call or IM," Jeff Woods, the head of marketing for HP's workstation division said Tuesday.

At $149, and no subscription fee, it costs less than a round-trip airplane ticket from pretty much anywhere, as Woods noted. It's available immediately to both business users and consumers as a download on HP.com. But customers who buy an HP workstation notebook or desktop will get the software included for free. Commercial notebook buyers will get a 90-day free trial version.

Adobe Systems on Thursday released a beta version of a file format called CinemaDNG the company hopes will simplify higher-end digital video processes and improve its quality.

The company behind Photoshop has developed a technology for still cameras called DNG, short for Digital Negative, and is trying to standardize it to encourage broader adoption. CinemaDNG takes the technology and applies it to video

For higher-end cameras such as SLRs, DNG records the raw data from the image sensor with no in-camera processing. That means there are no compression artifacts, no sharpening or contrast filters applied, no camera assumptions made about lighting conditions such as shady or sunny, and no discarding of richer 12-, 14-, or even 16-bit data in the conversion to 8-bit JPEG. The drawback to this flexibility and quality is that images require processing before they can be viewed.

CinemaDNG is comparable, according to the Adobe Labs description, including Adobe's hope to provide an alternative to proprietary raw formats.

"In many digital cinematography workflows, captured content is processed by software and hardware in the camera before it is saved to a storage device--and assumptions made during this processing could irrevocably damage the original imagery. Cinema DNG avoids these problems by capturing raw digital data directly from the camera's sensor, giving artists the power to make qualitative judgments after imagery has been saved to disk," Adobe said.

Other companies supporting CinemaDNG are Fraunhofer, Gamma & Density, Ikonoskop, Indiecam, Iridas, MXF4mac, RadiantGrid, Synthetic Aperture, The Foundry, Vision Research, and Weissc.

Adobe also released software to let its video-editing software import CinemaDNG files.

"Adobe and other industry participants have finalized the CinemaDNG specification and Adobe has made CinemaDNG plug-ins for Adobe After Effects CS4 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 software available online on Adobe Labs," the company said in a series of announcements at the 2009 IBC trade show in Amsterdam.

Adobe also announced beta testing of a new project, Adobe Story for writing scripts.

"Scriptwriting typically goes through several phases: initial outline, several drafts, final draft, shooting script and creation of a production shot list that accompanies the final script. Adobe Story is designed to help simplify and accelerate this process for virtually any creative endeavor," Adobe said. Scripts in a variety of other formats can be imported into the software.

And the San Jose, Calif.-based software company announced Flash Access 2.0, digital rights management technology that can control which individuals or devices are permitted to view online video. "Flash Access 2.0 now supports output protection, enabling content providers to specify requirements for protection of analog and digital outputs, providing additional safeguards against unauthorized recording," the company said.

Google's Matthew Papakipos touted HTML 5 features including the video tag at the Google I/O conference Wednesday.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google has begun supporting a new HTML feature to show video in its Chrome browser as an alternative to Adobe Systems' much more widely used Flash, but the technology overall remains rough around the edges.

The support comes in Chrome 3.0.182.2, a developer preview version that on Wednesday inaugurated work on the 3.0 generation of the Google browser. HTML video is one of a handful of technologies in the still unfinalized HTML 5 standard that Google hopes will transform the Web from a collection of relatively static sites to a foundation for full-blown applications that rival those on PCs.

The "video" tag in HTML already is available in various versions of Apple's Safari, Firefox, and Opera, which at least in theory makes handling video on the Web as easy as handling images. But the HTML 5 standard that includes video isn't finalized yet, so don't expect a coding revolution yet.

The video tag can be used to show video that today would show up in a conventional box, just as with Flash or Microsoft's competing Silverlight plug-in. But it also enables deeper integration with a Web site. For a good example, watch Paul Rouget's demonstration of HTML video in which images, text boxes, and videos are overlaid on another video, with a JavaScript program dynamically changing the appearance.

In a talk Wednesday at the Google I/O conference, Matthew Papakipos, a Google engineering director, said HTML 5 video will permit close integration with the Web site's programming, so for example various actions on the Web site can trigger different videos to start or stop.

The video tag tucked in Daily Motion's Web site could be a harbinger of significant changes on the Web.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

HTML 5 video still faces many hurdles to adoption, and browser support being just the first. Next come resolution of browser compatibility problems, upgrades by browser users to support the feature, and real-world use of the technology on Web sites.

The challenge is illustrated by video entertainment site DailyMotion, which on Wednesday announced plans to make 300,000 videos available through the HTML 5 video technology by the third quarter of 2009. DailyMotion recommends the Firefox 3.5 beta version to watch videos, which indeed worked for me, but the newest Chrome developer version and the Safari 4 beta reverted to Flash.

DailyMotion touts its use of HTML 5's video tag to show videos encoded with Ogg Theora technology--but the feature doesn't work with the Safari 4 beta or the latest version of Chrome.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

One issue is the technology used to encode and decode video. Firefox supports the Ogg Theora format for video (and the Ogg Vorbis format for the related HTML 5 audio tag), for example, and that's the format that DailyMotion is using.

More common in the real world, though, is the H.264 standard. Papakipos said Chrome will support H.264 video and AAC audio as well as Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio format.

MotionDSP, the company that offered a novel approach to improving photos and video through its now-discontinued FixMyMovie Web site, plans to release a promised version of its software for personal computers.

MotionDSP's vReveal software can extract higher quality from videos by drawing on the data in multiple frames showing the same scene.

(Credit: MotionDSP)

The $49.99 software program, called vReveal, analyzes a video's adjacent frames and combines the data to create a higher-quality version. This can bring out details in dim areas, correct camera shake, and remove noise and blocky compression artifacts, the company said. The software also can rotate videos, increase video resolution, and extract still images.

In addition, the company said the software can employ the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology from graphics chipmaker Nvidia, enabling PCs with appropriate video cards to accelerate the processing-intensive task. The technology doesn't work with all Nvidia graphics processing units, but it works on systems without a compatible video card, the company said.

"It can run up to five times faster when you have a CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPU in your system," said vReveal product manager Mike Sonders. "This multiframe analysis is incredibly hardware intensive."

CUDA offloads some processing to an Nvidia graphics chip, but software must be specially adapted to take advantage of the extra horsepower.

Cisco Systems' acquisition of Pure Digital Technologies, maker of the Flip camcorder, has sparked a lot of discussion about the networking giant's intentions. One theory is that Cisco is looking to compete with Apple--especially in the digital living room.

Ben Worthen at The Wall Street Journal surmises:

It isn't a big leap to see Cisco developing a home-media hub that cobbles these pieces together--some sort of device that allows people to upload and watch videos and listen to music throughout their homes. In fact, it looks like a next logical step. Apple has a similar device called Apple TV, which can direct music to a home audio system and videos to a television. It works with Apple's iTunes store, naturally.

All of that is true. Cisco has a lot of living room parts. The cable box (Scientific Atlanta), the router (Linksys), software to bring video conferencing to the home, and now the Flip camcorder.

Worthen connects a few dots and notes that the folks that make the Flip have proven they can create the right gadget at the right time. On that topic definitely read Michael Arrington's history lesson on Pure Digital and how it arrived at the Flip.

While this digital living room scrum is noteworthy--and pretty damn interesting--let's not lose sight of Cisco's big goal. Sell the big honking networking gear that will move all of this video around. Cisco really doesn't care where the video comes from as long as enterprises and consumers move a lot of it over a network increasingly powered by the networking giant's hardware and software.

The only thing Apple and Cisco have in common is that they want to sell you a ton of hardware. Apple sells the fashion statements and Cisco sells most of the stuff you never see in the network, data center and telecom provider. Every once in a while Cisco puts on a nice front end--Telepresence and Flip camcorders--to entice you to use more bandwidth for video.

The living room is only part of the equation for Cisco. In fact, it's only part of the equation for Apple. Both merely see it as an avenue to sell you more hardware. Both companies are pursuing different halo effects.

Here's a visual aid I cooked up to explain Cisco's grand plan (all roads lead to the router, switches and the fancy new servers). Click to expand:

(Credit: Larry Dignan/ZDNet)

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Cisco's yearly earnings.

If you haven't noticed, Cisco Systems, whose products have been used to build the Internet for 20 years, has spent the past 6 years becoming a big player in the consumer electronics market.

While Cisco still generates the bulk of its nearly $40 billion in yearly revenue from selling routers and switches to large companies and Internet service providers, the company has also been pushing into new markets, such as consumer electronics, over the past several years.

Still, most consumers probably have no idea who Cisco is or what it does. Sure, they may have seen those cute "human network" commercials on TV. But other than that, I'd guess the average Joe has no clue what Cisco does.

Some might be familiar with the Linksys brand, which has traditionally sold home networking gear. But Cisco executives say they are on a mission to make Cisco a household name. Not only is the company making a bigger effort to brand its products as Cisco, but it's also busy developing a slew of new products for the consumer market.

And on Thursday the company announced its most aggressive play in the consumer market to date with the $590 million acquisition of Pure Digital Technologies, the maker of the popular Flip Video mini camcorders.

But Pure is by no means the only major acquisition Cisco has made in the consumer market. In fact, the company so far has pretty much built this part of its business through acquisitions. In 2003, it got its start in the competitive CE market with the $500 million acquisition of the home-networking equipment maker Linksys. Then in 2005, it bought Scientific Atlanta, a quasi-consumer electronics company, for $7 billion. Scientific Atlanta makes set-top boxes that Cisco sells to subscription TV providers.

LAS VEGAS--Before making the new inexpensive mini camcorder it unveiled at CES Wednesday, Sony tried to purchase the category leader, Pure Digital.

Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow on Wednesday told CNET News that the vastly popular Flip Video camera made by Pure Digital came onto Sony's radar almost two years ago. Glasgow said he knew he wanted Sony to have a product in the category and talked to San Francisco-based Pure Digital about a possible acquisition six months ago.

Without saying how much Pure Digital was asking, Glasgow said it was much more than Sony wanted to pay. The two companies discussed several possible business scenarios, but none worked out.

And even before that, though the U.S. division of Sony really wanted an inexpensive mini camcorder for the U.S. market, the company's Japanese engineers didn't really see the utility of the product category.

Since neither scenario worked out, Sony, a leader in higher-end camera equipment, finally came out its own version of Pure Digital's Flip Mino camera, which uploads video directly to the Web via a USB port.

The Webbie does 1080p MPEG-4 video and shoots in 5 megapixels. The camera will be available in March for about $170.