It is not more than a week ever since Yahoo announced that they managed to snag exclusive rights to stream Saturday Night Live clips – all 38 seasons of it to be exact, but it seems that Yahoo has far more up their sleeves than what we originally thought. At the Digital Content NewFront event, Yahoo decided to follow in the footsteps of Netflix by announcing that its original comedy lineup will be rolled out in a “binge-viewing” style later this fall, throwing in the likes of Tiny Commando, We Need Help and Losing Your Virginity with John Stamos along the way. Not only that, those who love lifestyle programs will also be pleased to know that Fashion Recipe, Cinema & Spice and Grill Girls will soon make their debut online as well sometime later in the year.
Not only that, Yahoo has also inked a deal with the WWE in order to roll out an online wrestling hub from this summer onwards, where this hub will comprise of clips, a 30-minute Monday Night Raw pre-show, a couple of original weekly shows with 50 episodes each year, an archive that is full of historic matches, among others. Not only that, folks in Sunnyvale are also tipped to gain the capability of streaming video content from Conde Nast Entertainment. Summer’s going to be full of entertainment, again! [Press Release]
Wacom has revealed its latest pen-enabled graphics display, the Cintiq 22HD Touch, adding finger control to the stylus-equipped Full HD LCD monitor. The new version pairs a 16.7m color, 1920 x 1080 panel on an adjustable easel stand with the ability to use both Wacom’s special active-digitizer stylus or your fingertips for art apps, multitouch in Windows 7/8 and OS X, and more.
As with the non-touch variant of the Cintiq 22HD, this new screen recognizes up to 2048 different levels of pressure from the digital pen, as well as +/-60 levels of tilt on the pen’s nib. The included stylus also has an eraser head on the other end.
Spread around the bezel there are multiple shortcut buttons, with a total of sixteen customizable ExpressKeys – that can change function depending on which application has focus – on either side of the display. Touch-strips, meanwhile, are on the back of the panel, and can be programmed to control zooming, scrolling, bruss size, or rotation of the canvas.
The panel itself supports between 10- and 65-degree incline, and can be rotated by 180-degrees in either direction. It’s priced at $2,499 in the US and £1,899.99 in the UK.
AMSTERDAM — Willem-Alexander became the first Dutch king in more than a century Tuesday as his mother, Beatrix, abdicated after 33 years as queen.
The generational change in the House of Orange-Nassau gave the Netherlands a moment of celebration, pageantry and brief respite as this trading nation of nearly 17 million struggles through a lengthy recession brought on by the European economic crisis.
Nokia is set to further expand its camera expertise portfolio with a strategic investment in Pelican Imaging, a photography software specialist cooking up Lytro-style refocusable photos using array lenses. Pelican’s system, which first broke cover back in 2011, uses an array of 25 densely-packed individual lenses, the data from which is combined – using Pelican’s proprietary software – into a single, higher resolution still which can be post-tweaked for focus and even have 3D effects introduced.
Array cameras demand complex processing in order to actually achieve all that, however, which has meant news from Pelican has been quiet since the initial reveal. However, Nokia Growth Partners’ Bo Ilsoe told Bloomberg, such camera modules “are on the cusp of being commercialized and Pelican does software for that,” describing the firm as “one of the companies that has mastered this technology.”
In fact, Ilsoe confirmed, Nokia Growth Partners – the Finnish phone company’s venture-capital division – has had its metaphorical eye on Pelican Imaging since shortly after the company was founded, back in 2008. It’s unclear exactly how much has been invested in Pelican in this round.
Nonetheless, the move to broaden camera expertise dovetails well with Nokia’s push to highlight its Lumia Windows Phones’ photography abilities, particularly under the PureView brand. Last year, the company acquired camera processing tech from Scalado which allows components from multiple frames to be combined into a single photo.
Meanwhile, Nokia Growth Partners also holds investments in micro-optics specialist Heptagon, and sensor firm InVisage Technologies. The latter made headlines several years ago with its quantum-dot sensors that promise a roughly 4x increase in sharpness thanks to massively increased sensitivity to light compared to traditional CMOS.
Increasing light capture has been a central theme in Nokia’s photography push, beginning with the 808 PureView with its massive 41-megapixel sensor. That combined data from clusters of pixels to iron out visual glitches and boost accuracy in the final still, without producing massively unwieldy files. However, actually accommodating the sizable sensor in a more mainstream phone chassis is troublesome, and so Nokia has used other approaches – such as optical image stabilization using a suspended-lens system in the Lumia 920 – to try to broaden PureView’s impact.
The benefit of Pelican’s array technology, however, is that it offers increased 808 PureView-style light capture but without the comparative bulk. By combining data from multiple lenses, the company says users will be able to change focus after they take a photo, as well as capturing linear measurements, and scale and segment images.
Best Buy has revealed a definitive agreement to sell its 50-percent share of Best Buy Europe to Carphone Warehouse, which it entered into a joint venture with back in 2008. The sale will take place for the equivalent of $775 million, with the majority of it coming in the form of cash and the rest of it being offered in Carphone Warehouse Group stock with a one-year restriction, during which time the group can sell the shares on Best Buy’s behalf at issued prices and higher.
If such happens, the agreement has Carphone Warehouse pegged to pay whatever difference may result under an approximate $99 million agreement based on the sum total of the aforementioned proceeds Best Buy receives in addition to the market value of whatever shares may remain. In addition, says the announcement, Best Buy has to pay nearly $45 million to Carphone Warehouse to settle some current obligations it has with the group.
Although it is a definitive agreement, it isn’t yet completely settled, something that is currently slated to take place this upcoming June. Carphpne Warehouse shareholders need to approve the deal, but its board of directions have agreed and signed letters of commitment to the transaction. Likewise, Best Buy’s board also agrees with the deal. There are currently Best Buy stores being run in eight countries as part of the joint venture between the two companies.
Best Buy’s President and CEO Hubert Joly said about the announcement: “After reviewing the business and spending time with our partners, we concluded that the timing and economics were right to enter into this agreement with CPW. This transaction allows us to 1) simplify our business; 2) substantially improve our Return on Invested Capital, one of the five pillars of our Renew Blue transformation; and 3) strengthen our balance sheet.”
LOS ANGELES — A spokeswoman for Catherine Zeta-Jones says the actress has “proactively” checked into a mental health facility for treatment of her bipolar condition.
Publicist Sarah Fuller said in an email to The Associated Press late Monday that Zeta-Jones “is committed to periodic care in order to manage her health in an optimum manner.”
The OUYA team has made a chipper announcement, unveiling an exclusive game called Soul Fjord, which isn’t yet available but will be in the near future. In case the game’s name and logo aren’t suggestive enough, the game has a distinct musical-aspect to it wrapped up in a fantasy-land shell that forms a mashup of styles not often seen together. We’ve got a trailer available to watch after the jump.
The game stars afro-and-hatchet-wielding viking Magnus Jones, who is sent by Oden to kick butt and bring about some “righteous” judgment, if you get the joke. The game has just about every type of opponent you can imagine such a protagonist would face: dragons with slicked-back hair and earrings sipping martinis and belching flames, disco wizards, giants, and more.
If you didn’t check out the trailer, stop where you’re at and watch it – it’s worth 60-seconds of your time and has a funky beat. Back? The game was created by Airtight Games specifically for the OUYA as a free-to-play offering. Although the game isn’t done yet, it’s getting there and as a result OUYA has also published a video showing some behind-the-scenes action into what goes into making the game.
In case you missed it, OUYA began shipping out to the Kickstarter backers and top tier partners earlier this month, and has been moving ahead full steam since then, with the console hitting the FCC back on April 19th and boasting more than 10,000 global developers on the same day. Stay tuned, and we’ll update you as more info is dropped!
Mike Francesa admitted he would rather have been talking about quarterbacks on Monday afternoon. Unfortunately for the New York sports talk fixture, the most compelling story of the day involved 34-year-old NBA center Jason Collins rather than any of the signal callers coming to or going from the Big Apple. Not long before Francesa’s weekday radio show began on WFAN in New York on Monday afternoon, Collins came out as gay in an editorial in Sports Illustrated.
“I really don’t care. It means less than nothing to me that there is a gay player now out in the NBA,” Francesa said as he broached the subject of Collins coming out. “SI is going to reveal this this week in … I don’t know why … I guess … a dramatic attempt to sell magazines, I guess. I mean we all realize that there are plenty of gay people in America. You got to figure some of them are playing sports.”
Six months after Hurricane Sandy made landfall, the superstorm recovery situation remains a work in progress.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) appeared on Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” admitting from New York City’s ravaged Rockaways that the government’s aid response “took too long.” Coupled with that realization, he sees better days ahead.
“I think the next six months will be a whole lot better than the previous six, and that’s because we learned from the mistakes of Katrina in how to put this thing together,” Schumer said.
The ever-faithful @evleaks has dropped a new image, this time of a cell phone that harkens back to days-gone-by when cell phones had scrunched up keyboards in a candy-bar design. The NEC Terrain is said to be headed for AT&T and has a design that is distinctly old-school Blackberry, something that might appeal to some users but is mostly aged.
Even if you can get past the design, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything else that immediately catches attention, although to be fair not much has been said about the device. There’s what appears to be a 3.5-inch display, give or take a bit, which could probably be a full 4-inches if it wasn’t for the giant AT&T logo at the bottom of the panel. The keyboard is your standard QWERTY offering, and looks small enough to jam multiple buttons at once.
Although it wasn’t mentioned, by the looks of things in the image, this NEC handset runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich or higher. Given the product-shot style of the image, we’ll probably be seeing this device in an announcement in the near future. There’s no word on the kind of hardware its running, nor when we can expect to see it on shelves and how much it will cost. The only tidbit given was that it’ll be offered through AT&T.
Of course, Eric Schmidt of all people is a Blackberry user, and the sum total of his reason is because he likes the keyboard. If one of Google’s biggest names is still rocking a Blackberry in an environment likely overrun with Android devices, perhaps there is still a pocket of businessmen out there looking for an old-school Blackberry-wannabe device running the more popular Android operating system. In which case, godspeed NEC.
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It is not more than a week ever since Yahoo announced that they managed to snag exclusive rights to stream Saturday Night Live clips – all 38 seasons of it to be exact, but it seems that Yahoo has far more up their sleeves than what we originally thought. At the Digital Content NewFront event, Yahoo decided to follow in the footsteps of Netflix by announcing that its original comedy lineup will be rolled out in a “binge-viewing” style later this fall, throwing in the likes of Tiny Commando, We Need Help and Losing Your Virginity with John Stamos along the way. Not only that, those who love lifestyle programs will also be pleased to know that Fashion Recipe, Cinema & Spice and Grill Girls will soon make their debut online as well sometime later in the year.
