Category Archives: Digital ET

NewsAtSeven:Virtual news show

News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.

Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive, compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that the system is, at its core, completely virtual.

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   Infolab:North Western University

Gaming this season is a big fight

All of these high-profile launches come wrapped around
the holiday shopping season, creating a confluence of
events that only happens once every half a decade in
this business. The payoff could be huge: In 2011–the
peak year of the coming console generation–gaming
products will generate $44 billion in revenue, according
to DFC intelligence. How this fall’s new products fare will
go a long way toward making or breaking gaming
companies’ next five years.

Forbes has more on the battle this November as the biggies try to wrest the lead.

Google acquires broadcast rights of YouTube

It’s official now. Google acquires YouTube for a whopping US$1.65 billion, in an all-stock deal.

While the markets reacted favorably and analysts seem happy, here is an interesting (and expected?) reaction from Steve Ballmer, as reported by Patrick Thibodeau of Computer World.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today all but dismissed Google Inc.’s just-announced $1.65 billion purchase of video-sharing service YouTube as a waste of money … “If you look at most of the content up at YouTube today, it is copyrighted material,” said Ballmer. For all the chatter about how YouTube is all about home video, in the end people want to see things like replays of the recent 60 Minutes interview with former Hewlett-Packard Co. chairman Carly Fiorina, said Ballmer.

Related links
Business 2.0
Netribution
Computer World
Business Week
ZDNet
WLTX
ITBlogWatch
Steve Ballmer