New publishing model
HP and Rick Smolan have created “The OBAMA Time Capsule,” a first-of-its-kind customizable coffee table book showcasing US President Barack Obama’s journey to the White House, including his first 100 days in office.
To create a book, customers purchase the product on Amazon.com. Then, using the HP print-on-demand platform via the Internet, customers answer a few questions, upload personal photos and text, and hit “publish.” The result is a photo-rich book, merging each buyer’s name, photos and comments with photographs by leading photographers and commentary from noted writers. Customization features include:
• A personalized dedication page.
• Name on the cover and title page as co-author.
• Personal photo displayed on book’s back cover.
• A personalized mobile phone text message from President Obama.
• A personalized inauguration invitation.
• Personal photo appears next to key “who’s who” Obama supporters.
• Children’s artwork added to a page of Obama-related artwork from children around the country.
To make this book possible, HP developed a Web-based platform that publishes the book by uploading the reader’s customized pages to a designated print service provider, which then prints the book using HP Indigo digital presses. The OBAMA Time Capsule retails on Amazon.com for $34.95. For more details click to www.TheObamaTimeCapsule.com.
Online live video community
When people around the world wanted to watch singing sensation Susan Boyle in her live performance Sunday night on “Britain’s Got Talent,” where did they tune in? Not to YouTube. For live video Justin.tv is the choice. Justin.tv is the largest online community for people to broadcast, watch and interact around live video. The site has more than 428,000 channels broadcasting live video and 1.75 million hours of video watched per day.
Beyond basic video comments and ratings on other static video sites, Justin.tv enables its viewers to engage in live, real-time chat about the content that they are currently viewing. Justin.tv’s live video platform scales to support massive audiences by measuring demand in real-time and intelligently replicating streams to additional servers to meet that demand. Constructed by a team of MIT and Yale graduates, the Justin.tv platform pushes more than 177 Gbps of video at peak usage – the equivalent of 16,946 standard DVDs per hour.
Combine Firefox with Wolfram Alpha
A new experimental add-on to Mozilla’s Firefox browser merges the computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha with Google’s search engine. When performing a search, results from Wolfram Alpha appear on the side of your Google page. The addition of Wolfram Alpha to a Google search doesn’t slow down the search process – it just enhances it. Download it through https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12006.
Record video calls with ease
The Tandberg Compliance Appliance is a video recording appliance that documents and archives video files to fulfill multiple regulatory regulations or corporate requirements. The Tandberg Compliance Appliance automatically records every aspect of a video call, including all participant views and shared multimedia. It assigns meta data to each video file to make it easily accessible. The appliance also transcodes the file and transfers it to the appropriate storage environment.
Automatic announcements at the beginning of calls inform users that the call is being recorded. To ensure that every call is documented, the recording process does not require any action by meeting participants. Accessing stored data at a later date is also made simple. The solution can record up to 50 High Definition point-to-point calls at 1MB simultaneously.
