FocuSoft Tech Blog

Lala snips some of the ties that bind Web songs
Nintendo prepping ‘New Super Mario Bros. Wii’ and ‘Zelda: Spirit Tracks’ for the holidays
Five ways to become the next video star
Online radio comes to the BlackBerry
The Hollywood plot to turn DVD renters into buyers [UPDATED]
Microsoft stock soars despite downturns in sales and profit [Updated*]
Yikes: Hulu flirts with, yes, having you pay to watch it.
48 Stunning Photos of Fall [Shooting Challenge]

Lala snips some of the ties that bind Web songs

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 06:39 PM PDT

Lala.com’s new deal with Facebook and its rumored partnership with Google could introduce millions of music fans to the “Web song,” the cheap but, umm, not universally loved format that Lala pioneered. For the uninitiated, Web songs (which sell for 10 cents each or about a buck for an album’s worth), can be played from the Lala site but not downloaded, burned onto CD or otherwise moved. (Lala also sells conventional, full-featured MP3s for 89 cents.) Some might consider 10 cents a fair price for online access to a song; for others, it’s a ripoff in comparison to free on-demand services such as iMeem, Grooveshark and the much-anticipated Spotify. The critics’ biggest complaint is that people who buy Web songs can’t listen to them when they’re away from a computer or disconnected from the Net.

Lala may soon fix that problem, however, with a free iPhone app that enables people to play their Web songs on the road. It works even when stuck in an AT&T dead spot (more on that in a bit). The app, which still has to be submitted to and approved by Apple Inc., can also be loaded onto an iPod Touch. I saw a demo this week and it’s quite slick. Users can find tracks or albums from Lala’s 8-million-song catalog and play them with minimal delay, view their Lala news feeds to see and hear what their friends are listening to, share songs with Facebook friends, and add web songs easily to their Lala lockers. The app also stores up to 200 of songs on the phone — for now, it’s the ones most recently played by that user, but in the future Lala plans to give people more control over how to fill that cache. Those songs can be played even when you’re not online or connected to AT&T’s network — such as when you’re on a plane.

Being able to play Web songs with an iPhone dramatically improves the value proposition, at least for iPhone users. (Lala Chief Executive Bill Nguyen said the company was “excited” about the BlackBerry platform but doesn’t have an app available for iPhone rivals yet.) Of course, some people will still object to the notion of paying for music that comes with a diminished set of rights. But then, 10 cents a track is a steeply diminished price.

– Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times’ Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

via [LATimes.com]

Nintendo prepping ‘New Super Mario Bros. Wii’ and ‘Zelda: Spirit Tracks’ for the holidays

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 06:28 PM PDT

Nintendo is loading up the big guns this holiday season with new entries into two of its biggest franchises. Brand X got to spend some time with New Super Mario Bros. Wii and some of the other games a few days ago.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii feels more old than it does new. The game is similar to the New Super Mario Bros. game that launched to rave reviews on the Nintendo DS in 2006.

In addition to some controller-shaking features exclusive to the Wii hardware, the new Mario game multiplies the craziness by four. Scheduled to hit stores Nov. 15, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is the first Mario adventure that lets four players do their thing at the same time. It feels pretty chaotic, but we just couldn't put it down.

Check out the video demo at the top for a sneak peak at the new Mario game, along with The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks for the Nintendo DS and the recently released Wii Fit Plus.

– Mark Milian and Alexandra Le Tellier

Video credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times

See original here:
Nintendo prepping ‘New Super Mario Bros. Wii’ and ‘Zelda: Spirit Tracks’ for the holidays

Five ways to become the next video star

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 06:21 PM PDT

Internet funny guy Mike Polk. Credit: Break Media.

So you want to be a video star?

If you performed at a real-life comedy club in Los Angeles in the last three months, you could have been spotted by Mike Polk, a producer for Break.com who was scouting for fresh talent. Instead of clicking through countless YouTube videos to find someone, Polk decided to venture into (gulp!) the real world and hit a few live stand-up shows.

Based in Beverly Hills, Break.com gets about 70 million unique visitors a month, mostly guys 18 to 34 years old, making it one of the leading humor sites out there. Partly owned by Lionsgate Entertainment, the site serves up video game trailers, photos and short Web videos about cream cheese as deodorant pranks and Hummers on a rampage. You know, guy stuff.

Polk, whose background is in creating viral videos including a video promoting tourism in Cleveland that got 1.6 million hits, has been combing L.A.’s comedy clubs for Break.com’s next comedic star.

What was he looking for? And how are those traits different for online video personalities? In a recent interview, Polk gave us, in his own words, five criteria for online video stardom:

1) Immediacy: There has to be something that grabs you right off the bat. The Internet is flooded with people who can get your attention quickly. We’re looking for people who can be funny in a very short period of time.

2) Eye-catching thumbnail portrait: It’s not about being attractive. It’s about having presence and charisma. But online, you have to convey that on a picture about the size of a postage stamp. Thumbnails are incredibly important.

3) Versatility: There’s a one-man-band nature of Internet videos. You have to be able to incorporate music, work your own camera and know how to edit video. There are so many comics who don’t know how to do any of this.

4) Original persona: You need a concept of what you want to do and how you want to get that across. It has to be unique and original.

5) Likability: We want someone people would want to approach, someone who’s not already a star or full of himself. He has to be able to laugh at himself.

There’s one other criterion that Polk did not explicitly mention. But it’s all here in Break.com’s recruiting video. (Hint: You might want to bring an athletic cup to your audition.)

– Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

via [LATimes.com]

Online radio comes to the BlackBerry

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 06:05 PM PDT

The WunderRadio app brings online radio to BlackBerry phones. Credit: Jerome Adamstein.

BlackBerry phones are highly functional and many models have terrific keyboards, but they aren't exactly hip, especially when it comes to apps. In that department, iPhones win hands-down.

But finally, one of the best-liked online radio apps has come to the BB. WunderRadio, which can access Internet stations from around the world, has been released in a version that can play on the Curve and other models (the complete list is on the app site).

The app, which has a highly usable if not beautiful interface, allows you to search for a station by category — talk, sport or music. Next comes a screen that allows you to choose a genre (not surprisingly, the category with the most genres, by far, is music) and then up pops the available stations.

At the top of the list will be your local stations, determined via the phone's GPS capability.

Then you start up the station, which can take the better part of a minute to engage, but once it starts playing the sound is surprisingly good on earphones.

If it starts playing, that is. Several of the stations turned out to be duds — often because the Internet address of the station needed to be updated. (Radiotime, the company that organized the programming, invites listeners to notify it when a station can't be accessed.)

When it worked, it never failed to bring a smile to testers, whether listening to an all-Baroque station from Paris or Soca direct from Trinidad.

Two of nicest things about the app: You can save favorite stations for relatively quick access, and the radio pauses when you get a phone call.

Worst thing about WunderRadio: Although it functioned well in areas with Wi-Fi (we tested it on the Curve, which has Wi-Fi capability), it didn't work at all on an Edge cell network. Perhaps folks with phones that can use 3G networks would fare better.

You can try for yourself. The BB version of WunderRadio can be downloaded and used for free for 10 days. Then if you want to continue using it, there's a one-time fee of $9.99.

– David Colker

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Online radio comes to the BlackBerry

The Hollywood plot to turn DVD renters into buyers [UPDATED]

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 01:09 PM PDT

My colleague Ben Fritz reported today that some of the major Hollywood studios are mulling a plan to raise revenue by making people wait longer to rent movies. The goal would be to boost sales by creating a short window for home video sales before titles become available for rent. The strategy wouldn’t work unless the big video rental businesses cooperated, obviously, so the studios would have to buy them off by letting them buy discs at a deeper discount than they do today.

Ben’s a news reporter, so he couldn’t state the obvious problem with this idea. It’s crazy.

I understand that the trends aren’t encouraging for the studios. DVD sales are dropping, and delaying rentals might — might – reduce the momentum enjoyed by lower-margin rental services such as Redbox’s $1-a-night kiosks and Netflix’s monthly subscriptions. But the studios’ plan is based on the idea that consumers are more sensitive to delay than they are to price. It’s true that most of the demand for home video titles is exhausted quickly. But it’s absurd to assume that buying and renting are interchangeable in consumers’ minds, and that people who ordinarily might rent a title would buy it if that meant they could have it sooner. Maybe I’d see the world differently if I were on a Hollywood executive pay scale, but $3 to $5 strikes me as a much different price point than $15 to $25. Think about it. How often do people go to Blockbuster looking to rent a particular movie and, after finding all the rental copies taken, decide to buy a copy rather than rent something else?

If Hollywood wants to encourage buying instead of renting, it has to make purchased product significantly more valuable than the rented one. This isn’t a particularly easy problem to solve, given that video rental stores have access to the same discs that everyone else has. Some studios have been selling the major rental chains (presumably cheaper) versions of their movie discs stripped of the extra features, but the implication is that the missing features weren’t all that compelling to start with — otherwise, renters would demand them and the rental stores would comply. Nevertheless, the advent of connected disc players opens up a range of possibilities for the studios to provide more content and a better experience to buyers than to renters.

Such an approach would focus on generating consumer demand rather than frustrating it. In an era of expanding entertainment choices and intense competition for consumers’ time and money, any move to make it harder for people to get content on the terms they prefer seems self-defeating at best.

Corrected, 1:27 p.m.: The original post said that, “with rare exceptions, there’s no differentiation between the copies Blockbuster rents and the ones it sells.” In fact, Blockbuster and other video chains have been buying stripped-down versions of DVDs for their rental services, as the corrected post now states.

– Jon HealeyHealey writes editorials for The Times’ Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

via [LATimes.com]

Microsoft stock soars despite downturns in sales and profit [Updated*]

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 12:51 PM PDT

Microsoft Windows Microsoft Corp., fresh from yesterday’s Windows 7 launch, this morning reported a 14% slip in sales and an 18% plunge in profit for its fiscal first quarter. Its shares immediately soared, briefly flitting to a 52-week high of $29.35 before ending the day up $1.43 to $28.02.

Is Wall Street out of its mind?

To understand why, it’s helpful to look at the unofficial currency of financial markets — expectations. Analysts had forecast that the Redmond, Wash., technology giant would report per-share earnings of 32 cents. Microsoft instead earned 40 cents a share, better than investors had anticipated.

Expectations were also behind yesterday’s stock move. After Microsoft launched its most important product in three years, investors added just a penny to the company’s shares. That’s because the release of Windows 7 proceeded exactly as planned. Every aspect about Windows 7 had already been public knowledge, including its price, features and even consumer reviews.

So what did investors like so much about today’s earnings? Let’s take a closer look.

Net income for the quarter ended Sept. 30 was $3.6 billion, or 40 cents a share, down 18% from $4.4 billion, or 48 cents, a year earlier. Sales slipped 14% to $12.9 billion.

Many had expected the decline given the recession, which has all but paralyzed businesses that may be considering buying new computers. Instead, many organizations either made do with their old machines or opted for cheap netbook computers. Costing little more than $200 apiece, netbooks are so cheap they offer little or no profit for their manufacturers or for Microsoft, which sells the operating system software for these devices.

“Microsoft, like the rest of the PC industry, is struggling with low average selling prices,” said Richard Shim, analyst with research firm IDC.

Still, Microsoft was able to beat expectations by aggressively cutting costs. Operating expenses fell 8% from a year earlier to $8.4 billion.

Another reason for Wall Street’s counter-intuitive euphoria: It could have been worse.

The results, Technology Business Research analyst Allan Krans wrote in a note to investors, “though still weak, reflect stabilization of the economy and Microsoft’s revenue streams.”

*This post, which was written prior to the close of Nasdaq, has been updated to include Microsoft’s closing price.

– Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

via [LATimes.com]

Yikes: Hulu flirts with, yes, having you pay to watch it.

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 12:00 PM PDT

rubbish

Hey, remember Hulu.com? It was a Web site that sort of came out of nowhere, and offered streaming TV shows from NBC and other networks. It was ad-supported, and free. People liked it. And then, one day, in October, 2009, a completely bonkers TV executive all but killed it with one sentence: "It's time to start getting paid for broadcast content online."

Those are the words of News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey, uttered at some sort of broadcasters pow wow.

The idea that News Corp. (and the other broadcast execs) expects to be paid for something that travels through the air 100 percent freely, and has for decades is, that’s right, ludicrous. And I’m referring only to broadcast content here. Shows like The Office and The Simpsons, and not Curb Your Enthusiasm or Weeds. Ads pay for the broadcast shows, and that anyone expects us to pay for those shows again! Ha!

It’s like this: Hulu already runs ads. I’m not gonna pay for access to the site when there’s already ads on there.

Never mind the fact that people only put up with the ads because the site is a convenience. "Sure, I’ll put up with a few ads so long as I can watch 30 Rock in between CrunchGear posts." Otherwise, yeah, I’ll head right back to alt.binaries.multimedia and start downloading away. No ads there, and in 720p!

I mean, was I stealing all those Seinfeld reruns or 24 (aka the Jack Bauer Power Hour) when I had an HDTV antenna hooked up to my TV? I don’t recall paying to watch those shows; that’s what the ads were for!

In essence, charging for Hulu is a one-way to Irrelevant Town. I don’t care either way, seeing as thought I really haven’t watched TV for several years now (outside of live sports).

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Yikes: Hulu flirts with, yes, having you pay to watch it.

48 Stunning Photos of Fall [Shooting Challenge]

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 12:00 PM PDT

Earlier this week, we issued our first shooting challenge “fall leaves” to the photographers among you. And holy crap are there some impressive photographers among you.

First Place
Wade Saathoff: Nikon D300, Nikkor AF 50mm f/1.4, 1/100th, f/3.2, ISO 320, 14 bit RAW, .nef converted using Raw Therapee and edited in Photoshop 7

Second Place
Tess Davis: Sony A350, 18-70mm kit lens, f/4.5, 1/200s, ISO 100

Third Place
Neal Rosenblat: Nikon D90, 50mm lens, f1.8, 1/2000

Thanks to everyone for making the first Shooting Challenge so much fun. And since these results are completely subjective, enjoy the full gallery below before mocking my taste in the comments. Still, I don’t think there’s a lousy shot in the bunch.