Sony to offer UltraViolet movies in France and Germany starting late September

Sony to offer UltraViolet access to Germany in September, France in the fall

To use UltraViolet these days, you have to live in one of a few English-speaking countries. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment will change that soon: the company just teased its plans for the digital locker service in mainland Europe. According to the firm’s David Bishop, Germans will get cloud access to Sony movies in late September — possibly September 30th, as DECE hinted in April — while the French will have their turn sometime in the fall. Neither Sony nor other studios have provided additional launch dates, although we know that neighboring countries like Belgium and the Netherlands should be next on the list.

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Source: Handelsblatt (translated)

Talking Window ad campaign on German trains

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” Fairy tales in the past certainly do have a kind of charm about them, and little kids will believe just about anything – including a princess who can feel a pea that is located underneath plenty of mattresses, or a talking mirror as illustrated in the opening sentence, or a princess with extremely long hair that doubles up as a rappelling rope for her Prince Charming. Perhaps a modern day equivalent of something that is inspired by fairy tales would be the Talking Window ad campaign, a concept which was developed by ad agency BBDO Germany on behalf of Sky Deutschland, a broadcaster.

The whole idea of the Talking Window is this – BBDO Germany hopes that it could be yet another interesting ad placement move, where ads will be transmitted to those who lean their heads against the window of a train, as sound will appear as it it comes “from inside the user’s head”, and this is achievable thanks to the wonders of bone conduction technology. Bone conduction basically transmit sound to the inner ear through the method of passing vibrations through the skull.

Needless to say, this particular ad idea has already raised a fair number of questions and is a controversy all on its own. Some people think that this is a violation of a person’s right to rest, and frankly, I do agree with that assessment. Not everyone is rich enough to be chauffeured around, and some of us do not even have enough dough to buy our own rides, hence having to rely on public transport like the train. After a particularly hard day at work, leaning one’s head against the window to get some much needed shuteye, or simply to check out the view, is one of life’s little pleasures, and to have that personal time and space violated by an advertisement is not the ideal idea of relaxation to say the least. What do you think?

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[ Talking Window ad campaign on German trains copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Lovefilm bringing Star Trek, other CBS shows to the UK and Germany

Lovefilm bringing Star Trek, other CBS shows to the UK and Germany

CBS may have teamed up with Netflix in the US to satisfy those of us with an Enterprising bent, but the company has taken a different tack in the UK and Germany. Instead, the firm has signed a deal with Lovefilm to bring CBS and Showtime-owned shows to Amazon’s streaming network. The press release promises that users will be able to watch classic Star Trek, Voyager, The Good Wife, Dexter and Californication instantly, although a brief check of the UK site reveals that you may need to wait a short while more before you can immerse yourself in the Delta quadrant / Hank Moody’s psyche.

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Vodafone to buy Germany’s biggest cable operator for $10.1 billion

Vodafone to buy Germanys biggest cable operator for $101 billion

Every summer, the world’s second biggest mobile provider likes to splash out on a broadband company to bolster its cellular offerings. Last year, for instance, Vodafone snapped up Cable & Wireless’ British fiber-optic network for $1.6 billion — but that’s a bargain compared to the $10.1 billion it’s just sealed for Germany’s largest cable company, Kabel Deutschland. Unlike last year’s deal, which concentrated on infrastructure, this move will see Vodafone entering the triple-play market, offering mobile, fixed-line and TV services. Anyone got a German dictionary to hand? We want to look up what “technofreaks” translates to.

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Via: Reuters

Google News in Germany asks publishers to opt-in for indexing, sidesteps copyright fees

Despite its “Defend Your Net” campaign last year, Google was unable to fully put the brakes on changes to German copyright law that may mean it has to pay up for news excerpts it indexes. As a result, the company announced that unlike the other 60 countries where Google News operates by relying on sources to opt out of inclusion by request, robots.txt file or meta tags, it’s requiring German publishers to opt-in. According to Google, it’s pushing six billion visits per month to publishers worldwide as a free service, not something it should have to pay for. As TechCrunch points out, the issue comes as a result of the new German law that allows search engines to continue to publish snippets of news without paying, but isn’t clear about just how much information that can include.

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Via: TechCrunch (1), (2)

Source: Google Germany Product Blog

Sony Mobile event invites tease sizable surprise, could mean Xperia Z Ultra

Sony Mobile event invites tease sizable surprise, could mean Xperia Z Ultra

Several French sites report receiving invites (shown above) to a Sony Mobile press event promising a surprise of size while showing off a device’s slender side profile and a stylus. The reference could be a teaser for the rumored Xperia Z Ultra, believed to be a Sony competitor to the Galaxy Notes of the world featuring a 6.44-inch 1080p display and possibly a Snapdragon 800 CPU inside. The buttons also seem to match another leaked image, and invites have also gone out for events in Germany and China on June 25th, while the message itself encourages recipients to “note” it in their calendar.

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Source: FrAndroid, Xperia Blog

Apple revises warranty policies in France, Germany and Belgium in response to EU law

Apple revised its warranty policy in Italy last year after being hit with a €900,000 fine for not complying with an EU-mandated two-year term, and it looks like those changes are now starting to spread further throughout Europe. The company has today revised the terms of its warranties in France, Germany and Belgium, specifying that customers are entitled to repairs and replacements of their Apple products for a full two years after purchase, and not just one as previously stated. No word yet on when the rest of the EU will see those changes, but it would now seem to be just a matter of time before other countries get the new terms as well.

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Via: Electronista

Source: ZDNet, 9 to 5 Mac

PayPal mistakenly informs users they’ve won 500 euros in a comedy of errors

DNP PayPal mistakenly informs users they've won 500 euros in a comedy of errors

Most of us who receive an email stating we’re lucky winners of 500 units of cash money from PayPal might brush it off as a phishing scam. But what happens if the email looks legit? And what if PayPal was genuinely running a promotional campaign offering that amount to 10 random people each day, as long as they used the service that week? You’d be forgiven for believing it. That’s exactly what happened to some PayPal users in Germany yesterday when they received an official email stating they’ve won 500 euros. So they rushed to their PayPal accounts only to find… nothing. You see, PayPal did actually send those emails, but it did so accidentally. PayPal Germany offered a mea culpa on its Facebook page, stating that it was “due to a technical error” and winners have not yet been chosen. Oops. Maybe PayPal should consider giving that money away anyway; it could stand to improve its image after all.

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Via: The Next Web

Source: PayPal Deutschland (Facebook)

PMD and Infineon to enable tiny integrated 3D depth cameras (hands-on)

PMD and Infineon show off CamBoard Pico S, a tiny 3D depth camera for integration video

After checking out SoftKinetic’s embedded 3D depth camera earlier this week, our attention was brought to a similar offering coming from Germany’s PMD Technologies and Infineon. In fact, we were lucky enough to be the first publication to check out their CamBoard Pico S, a smaller version of their CamBoard Pico 3D depth camera that was announced in March. Both reference designs are already available in low quantities for manufacturers and middleware developers to tinker with over USB 2.0, so the two companies had some samples up and running at their demo room just outside Computex.

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Amazon, Viacom deal keeps many TV shows on Prime and Kindle, some exclusively

Amazon, Viacom extension keeps kids shows on Prime and Kindle, some exclusively

In May Netflix let a broad content deal with Viacom (parent company of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV and more) expire and saw many of the network’s shows disappear from its streaming service, but Amazon will not follow its lead. Today the company announced an extension in its own agreement with Viacom that not only keeps the TV shows (over 250 seasons including more than 3,900 episodes) but includes a provision for a “selection” of exclusives. That means Amazon will stream Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. kids shows like Dora the Explorer, The Backyardigans, Blues Clues and Victorious, with some available as part of the Kindle FreeTime Unlimited package on its tablets and some heading to Lovefilm in Germany and the UK later this summer. Other shows affected by the deal include current and upcoming ones from MTV and Comedy Central like Workaholics, Key and Peele and Awkward.

For its part, Netflix has also expanded a deal with Disney and is even producing an original kids show of its own to follow up on projects like House of Cards and Arrested Development, but so is Amazon. As competition in the subscription streaming market intensifies expect to see more exclusives as studios play the services against each others to drive prices up — as seen here, if one decides to invest more in original content and deals for specific content there will likely be a cost in other areas.

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Source: Amazon