Author: rakesh

Google Video lets you link to any specific place within a video now — just append the timecode in this form (#1m34s) and it’ll jump you to that exact location.  I believe this feature will prove to be extremely popular and widely copied by other online video services.  This goes a long way to improve the linkability of online videos.

Fox also announces their fall 2006 premiere dates:

Monday, August 21
8:00-9:00 p.m. Prison Break
9:00-10:00 p.m. VANISHED

Wednesday, August 30
8:00-9:00 p.m. Bones
9:00-10:00 p.m. JUSTICE

Thursday, August 31
8:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS

Tuesday, September 5
8:00-9:00 p.m. STANDOFF
9:00-10:00 p.m. House

Thursday, September 7
8:00-8:30 p.m. ‘TIL DEATH
8:30-9:00 p.m. HAPPY HOUR
9:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS

Friday, September 8
8:00-9:00 p.m. Nanny 911
9:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS Results Show

Saturday, September 9
8:00-8:30 p.m. COPS
8:30-9:00 p.m. COPS
9:00-10:00 p.m. America’s Most Wanted

Sunday, September 10
8:00-8:30 p.m. The Simpsons
8:30-9:00 p.m. American Dad
9:00-9:30 p.m. Family Guy
9:30-10:00 p.m.The War At Home

Saturday, September 16
11:00 p.m.-Midnight MADtv
Midnight-12:30 a.m. TALK SHOW WITH SPIKE FERESTEN

Friday, October 6
9:00 p.m. Trading Spouses: Meet your New Mommy

Thursday, November 2
9:00 p.m. The O.C.

TV.com posts NBC’s schedule for their new fall TV lineup:

September 18
Deal or No Deal (special two-hour edition, 8-10 p.m.)
STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP (10-11 p.m.)

September 19
Law & Order: Criminal Intent (9-10 p.m.)
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (10-11 p.m.)

September 20
The Biggest Loser (8-10 p.m.)
KIDNAPPED (10-11 p.m.)

September 21
My Name Is Earl (8-8:30 p.m.)
The Office (8:30-9 p.m.)
Deal or No Deal (9-10 p.m.)
ER (10-11 p.m.)

September 22
Law & Order (10-11 p.m.)

September 25
HEROES (9-10 p.m.)

October 3
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (8-9 p.m.)

October 4
TWENTY GOOD YEARS (8-8:30 p.m. and 8:30-9 p.m.)

October 11
30 ROCK (8:30-9 p.m.)

October 20
Crossing Jordan (8-9 p.m.)
Las Vegas (9-10 p.m.)

While I was visiting my sister in Berkeley over the July 4th weekend, we got out and did some hiking in El Cerrito (town just North of Berkeley). Here’s my first attempt at a stitched together panoramic shot…

(you really want to see large or larger version)

Some quick lessons learned for myself for future panorama attempts:

• use the same the shutter and aperture speed on every photograph (I had to manually adjust brightness and contrast on each photo above to even get close and I lost more detail than I would have liked in the process)
• I used AutoStitch to build this image — but it unfortunately only worked on 5 out of 9 of my images. It didn’t link the other 4 into the panorama above. And it started out only stitching together 3 of the 9 — I had to tweak the alpha, beta and number of retries parameters to get it to recognize 5. I could have done with less intelligence on the part of AutoStitch. I would gladly have just told it the sequence of my images. Is there better photo stitch software?
• A tripod would have been nice. 🙂 Without one, the alignment of each frame was off the next one by enough that by the end, when I was ready to crop the final product down to a rectangle, I probably lost 5% of the potential height of the Panorama.  Another way to approach this would have be to pad each frame out so that my target image would have remained intact, even after cropping.

We enjoyed ghazals at Anil Uncle’s house last weekend… A ghazal (pronounced just like “guzzle”) is an “Urdu poem, vocal song style” (courtesy of Google Web Definitions). Basically it’s Urdu poetry that is sung. I love the music but can’t claim to have anything more than a broken understanding of the underlying poetry. Shonali, on the other hand, eats and breathes this stuff. Two photographs of the living room (there were two other rooms in Uncle’s house where people were hanging out, eating, talking… it was great):

This emarketer brief says people are paying money for mobile applications like MapQuest (average of $3.99 / month) on their cell phones.

Wacky, when a lot of these things are free (like Google Maps Mobile which I use all the time) with an unlimited data plan.  And with all the other useful things you can do on a cell phone with an unlimited data plan, I have to believe that mobile phones will mimic the web.
But then the mobile service providers also hold the keys to resolving the big problem with the mobile web (at a high level, there has to be better integration betweeen services and phone platforms… a separate post on this later).

What’ll it take for mobile service providers to give up their walled gardens?

Kevin Smith is responding to a movie critic… and how!

This is exactly what I was talking about when I wrote that movie makers should respond to their critics (though I never imagined it would be as much fun as Kevin’s response!)

(hat-tip to Jeremy)

Got this by e-mail yesterday… Two different news sources commenting on the same analyst study.  One says this space will exceed $48B, the other says $44B… hey, what’s $4B between friends?

It’s always interesting to see a flurry of articles loosely relating to the same topic and that’s what I’ve seen in the past couple of days around the topic of content creators connecting with their audiences.

I wrote something recently about how movie makers should respond to reviews of their products.

And then this weekend the New York Times wrote an article about how TV show fans and creators are connecting on the Internet.  An excerpt from the article:

“…television viewers are migrating en masse to the Internet, looking not only to watch their favorite shows online but also for ways to discuss and engage with those shows.”

The same New York Times writes about how theater producers are using the web to connect reach and galvanize their audiences:

“…the Internet has provided a new and, some say, vastly improved set of tools to generate [word of mouth]: not just e-mail blasts but also Web sites, banner ads, search-engine pop-ups and blog coverage. In the last few years these tools have reshaped the way the theater reaches its audience.”

And then, as the pendulum swings the other way, the legal department at Paramount works overtime to alienate their audience, as reported on LostRemote earlier this week.

People who are creating media are beginning to interact with their audiences — it’s such an obvious thing.  It’s happening in software, where small and large developers alike rely on getting direct feedback from customers on their products.  It’s happening in music, as Ethan Kaplan talked about at Gnomedex.  And there’s no doubt that conversations about TV shows, movies, theater, and all other types of media are happening and will continue to happen regardless through the blogosphere and through various online communities.  But, the exciting and new thing here is that the content creators are starting to participate so those conversations are about to get a lot more interesting.