Category Archives: IT

Digital ET, Etc., Internet

NewsAtSeven:Virtual news show

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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.

Related links
   Infolab:North Western University

Etc., Internet

iPod: A flashback

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“It looks like a great product,” he said.

Then he paused a second. Something didn’t compute.

“It’s only for Macintosh?” he asked.

What did Bill Gates say when he first saw the iPod?

Did Apple engineers use foam core and old fishing weights to craft a model of new MP3 player?

Steven Levy of Wired.com, gives a movie-esque narration of the events that led to the emergence of the iPod, with a pre-titles Bill Gates intro scene. Here is the complete article.

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The perfect thing
Instant Expert
Laksh online: Apple’s Internet Journey
Laksh online: Steve Jobs gets repetitive

Etc., Internet

What is the Hype Machine?

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The Hype Machine tracks songs and discussion posted on the best music blogs. Easily listen, discover and buy songs that everyone is talking about!

For any media-minded investor, the appeal of Volodkin and the Hype Machine is easy enough to see. Since the rise of Napster, the music industry has been in a prolonged state of upheaval – one that is only growing more chaotic. New tools are being invented (Pandora, Last.fm) for navigating the new digital soundscape. New avenues for promotion (the MP3 blogs) are emerging as star-making vehicles for acts like Arctic Monkeys and Gnarls Barkley. (The summer megahit “Crazy,” for example, first showed up on the Hype Machine last October.)

In this context, it’s not surprising that the Web is also enabling what Volodkin(20-year old founder of Hype Machine) calls a “new kind of conversation about music.”

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Business 2.0–Capturing the buzz
Hype Machine