A recent report from Nielsen shows that folks in the US and UK enjoy using their mobile devices while watching TV, while those in Germany and Italy prefer to do one thing at a time says a report in CNET.
Up to 88 percent of US tablet owners and 86 percent of US smartphone owners use their device at least once a month while watching TV. Some (26 percent) use their tablet in front of the TV several times each day. In the UK, the trend mirrors the US with 80 percent of tablet owners and 78 percent of smartphone owners relaxing with their mobile device at least once a month while gazing at the TV. Twenty-four percent admit to using their device while watching TV several times each day.
Italy and Germany buck this trend with more than thirty percent of people saying they have never used a tablet while watching TV. When people around the world multitask with their tablet and TV, most people use the tablet to check email or research information about the TV show or movie the they are watching.
Simon Fuller’s XIX Entertainment has partnered with yap.TV to create an immersive second-screen experience around the multilingual international hit ¡Q’VIVA!.
¡Q’VIVA! The Chosen is reality competition show featuring Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony and Jamie King as they travel across Latin America in search of “The Chosen Ones.” The best talent is brought back to the United States and tasked with becoming part of a big Las Vegas show dubbed “the greatest Latin show ever.”
The show debuted in January on Univision and an English-language version first aired in March. Thus far, the show has more than 30 million viewers worldwide.
We write a lot about social TV and the second-screen apps and experience, but it’s almost always in the context of English-only programming focused on U.S. audiences.
That’s what makes the ¡Q’VIVA!/yap.TV partnership unique. Rather than simply looking to recreate the same old staid second-screen experience, yap.TV and the ¡Q’VIVA! producers looked at how to reach fans across the international and multilingual spectrum.
Although yap.TV has its own iOS app, the platform is also accessible on other platforms thanks to HTML5. That means Latin American viewers can access the yap.TV ¡Q’VIVA! experience from other mobile devices. and HTML5 means BlackBerry — a device popular in Latin America — can still get support, even without a native app.
Social From the Start
In addition to synching with the live experience with the show — showcasing social feeds, photos and conversations — the app also works as a way for users to monitor social conversations and tweets about the show. Moreover, Mark Shedletsky at XIX tells us that social was part of the DNA behind ¡Q’VIVA! from the very beginning.
Users can chat in real time, take polls and browse Twitter feeds from those associated with the show. The app experience uses audio-fingerprinting to deliver custom information for that particular moment in the show. Users can even shop for J. Lo’s various looks from within the app experience.
To that end, the producers considered building a branded app or using a more agnostic destination service. While yap.TV actually powers third-party branded apps (including USA Network’s USA Everywhere app), the advantage of being part of the core experience is that the show can get more promotion across the website and iOS apps and become part of the existing community at large.
The English and Spanish versions of ¡Q’VIVA! are at the top of yap.TV’s leaderboard of most popular and most-discussed shows, so that decision has paid off.
The Future
What’s next? Shedletsky tells us XIX will be making the social and digital layer a priority in upcoming programs, noting that “the second screen is the future.”
We feel this way, too. At Mashable Connect next month, I’ll be moderating a panel discussing the evolution of the second screen, talking with app makers and programmers about how programming is changing to encompass these second screen experiences.
If the second screen is to take off the way many in the industry hope it will, the experiences will have to be multilingual and multiformat. To that end, it’s great to see Spanish and Portuguese social TV fans getting some love.
Let us know what you think about yap.TV and ¡Q’VIVA!‘s plans for the second screen in the comments.
From May 3-5, 2012, join Mashable for our biggest conference of the year and explore the future of digital. Our annual destination conference brings our community together for three days to connect offline in an intimate setting at the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World®. At this year’s conference you’ll hear from leaders like Joe Trippi, Lawrence Lessig, Roger McNamee, Hilary Mason, Pete Cashmore and others about how emerging digital media and technology will shape our lives now and in the years to come.
Waiting a day or so, of course, means that prime-time programming on Hulu Plus and Netflix has you mostly covered; but that loses you local news, sports and talk. Even single channels, brands or sports leagues (ESPN, NBA Courtside, MLB At Bat) are getting into the action -- but getting live access means hefty subscription fees, being an existing cable/satellite customer, or both.
If you're not interested in the supra-broadcast offerings that cable or satellite can deliver -- or if you just can't stomach the idea of paying $60, $75 or more per month to watch television -- there is this ancient and hoary concept called "over the air." Yes, Americans are still benefiting from their divinely granted inalienable rights to free TV, but they need antennas and reasonable signal strength, not to mention TVs. Elgato's HDHomeRun product works well to take your TV programming to your Mac or PC, but it's a $179.95 cost and you can't really carry it around with you.
That's why Aereo's offering -- $12 a month for broadcast TV to your iPhone, iPad, Roku box or browser, as long as you live in New York City -- is so intriguing. Aereo has chosen to deliver over-the-air television programming straight to the browser, rather than through a native iOS app, and the result is remarkably smooth and easy to use. By combining your device with a remote antenna/DVR combo, and allowing easy AirPlay/Apple TV streaming or Roku integration for big-screen viewing, the service seems to have found a way to deliver a premium live and recorded programming experience without the steep price.
The geofencing limitation on Aereo's market is a consequence both of the technology that Aereo has invented and the television industry's regulatory ecosystem. Aereo is working around the legal minefields of "rebroadcasting" to customers by making every subscriber the renter of a tiny bit of New York real estate -- a pair of teensy HD antennas, each the size of a dime, rack upon rack of them in the company's datacenter. Through the subscriber website, you can browse and search the live TV program guide, assign episodes for recording on a 40 GB DVR, share viewing choices with Twitter or Facebook contacts -- it's all there, and all pretty easy.
The proof of any streaming service, however, is in the video quality. Aereo allows users to force a low, medium or high quality setting, plus an automatic setting that adjusts to available bandwidth. In my testing of Aereo's service, I made a point of sticking to high-speed WiFi on my iPad 2 to give the video quality the best chance to show off -- and show off it did. The video clip above gives you a taste, but keep in mind that you can quickly take the video full-screen (I didn't do that in the demo, as it would have broken my recording). The full-screen streaming looks fantastic; it's largely indistinguishable from broadcast at its best, and even when it chunks up a bit it's still very watchable.
Aereo is offering 90 days of free trial service to New Yorkers on a rolling invitation basis as it spins up into full operation. There are still a few rough edges to fix; if you're timeshifting a program by a few minutes, for instance, it has a habit of cutting off when you reach the scheduled stop time (rather than just rolling forward as it would on a conventional DVR). Building the service on a pure HTML/mobile web platform, however, gives the company space to iterate rapidly and fix bugs faster than Apple's review process would allow. Support for more browsers and more devices is also in the immediate plans.
If I was in a cord-cutting mood -- but I still wanted to keep my DVR capability and supercharge my TV mobility -- I'd put Aereo at the top of my service list. It remains to be seen how well customers take to it and what kind of geographic range the service will eventually cover; if you don't live in NYC then (forgive me for this) you'll have to stay tuned.
What can influence how quickly your injuries heal, whether or not you catch the flu, and the health of your cardiovascular system?
The answer: inflammation! Inflammation is part of the vascular system’s complex response to harmful stimuli. The tissues and blood cells that keep your body healthy are intertwined in a complex network that makes up your vascular system. It plays a critical role in maintaining your body’s immune system and heart function. Inflammation affects everyone – and tends to become harder to control as you age – but it is especially important for athletes to control inflammation in order to be able to compete at peak performance.
Measuring inflammation
One of the best inflammation indicators we have is a protein in the blood that acts as a proxy for inflammation, called C-reactive protein (or CRP). Levels of CRP rise and fall in response to inflammation, so knowing your CRP measurement tells you a lot about what’s going on in your body. The American Heart Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have designated a CRP concentration of below 1.0 mg/L as low risk for heart problems; between 1.0 to 3.0 mg/L as average risk for heart problems; above 3.0 mg/L as high risk for heart problems. Very high levels of CRP (more than 10 mg/L) can also indicate an impaired immune response or inflammatory disease.
Since CRP is a protein found in your blood, the only way you can get information about your levels is to have a blood sample analyzed through a service like InsideTracker. CRP is measured in the Performance Panel, along with testosterone, white blood cell count, potassium, sodium, zinc and chromium (in addition to the thirteen other biomarkers).
Inflammation and athletes
Athletes should be particularly concerned with monitoring their levels of CRP since performance is so closely tied to their cardiovascular fitness. Good news for athletes: consistent and moderate aerobic exercise is one of the best ways to lower inflammation. Regular exercise has actually been shown to reduce inflammation by 20-60% and to reduce white blood cell count (another marker for inflammation) during and after exercise. That’s why athletes, especially swimmers, have some of the lowest levels of CRP around.
Interestingly enough, inconsistent exercise can actually have the opposite effect on inflammation. For all you weekend warriors out there, keep in mind that engaging in intense, but inconsistent exercise can increase your white blood cell levels, increase inflammation and weaken your immune system. Research has shown that prolonged strenuous exercise (i.e. running a marathon) can actually triple white blood cell levels! And athletes who over-train or over-exert themselves during competitions can weaken their immune systems, making it more difficult to recover properly.
Controlling CRP through diet
What you eat also has an effect on inflammation. To keep your levels in check, avoid eating foods that are high in fat, calories, sugar, and salt (such as fast foods). Aim for foods that are high in antioxidants like vitamins C and E, fiber, calcium, fish oils, mono-unsaturated fats, and low on the glycemic index. Specific foods that have been shown to have an effect on lowering inflammation include garlic, grapes, herbs and spices, soy protein, nuts, olive oil, black and green teas, and vinegar. (Many of these foods are consistent with following a Mediterranean Diet, a good way to keep your CRP levels in the healthy range.) Aim to eat at least six servings of fruits and vegetables per day, which will benefit much more than your CRP levels. Discover new types of fruits and vegetables to work into your daily repertoire using InsideTracker’s Food Menu tool.
Alcohol’s effect on inflammation is complicated. Researchers agree that your best bet is to drink alcohol in moderation. Consuming moderate amounts of alcohol (such as no more than 2 glasses of wine, 1 pint of beer, or 4 oz. of liquor at a time) will actually lower your white blood cell count and CRP levels more than not drinking at all or drinking too much. That’s right; you’re better off drinking a little than not at all when it comes to CRP. Cheers!
When diet and exercise aren’t enough
When you can’t control inflammation through diet and exercise alone, supplements can help. Vitamins C, D, and E have all been linked to promoting healthy levels of inflammation. Taking 1,000 mg vitamin C per day may reduce your CRP levels by as much as 25%. Long distance runners or triathletes can cut their risk of developing upper respiratory tract infections in half by taking 600 mg per day of vitamin C for 21 days before a competition. This dosage works well to reduce the severity and duration of infections as well.
Vitamin D also appears to play a role in reducing inflammation for women. Those with adequate levels of vitamin D in their blood were less likely to develop inflammation, according to researchers. In fact, each 10ng/ml increase in serum vitamin D is associated with a 25% reduction of CRP. So make sure you soak up a few minutes of sunshine per day, or consider taking a supplement to get your D fix.
Some factors influencing inflammation are outside of your control. Environmental factors such as air pollution, second-hand smoke, and economic stress can all increase inflammation. But there is much you can do to ensure that inflammation doesn’t adversely affect your health. Engage in moderate, regular exercise and eat a diet that includes many of the foods listed above. If you smoke, quit. Make sure you get enough sleep (adults should aim for 7 – 9 hours), and lose weight if your weight is currently outside of a healthy range. If you need help with finding foods you like that can lower your inflammation, consider signing up for InsideTracker’s Performance Panel for a uniquely customized tool to help you make the most of your diet and exercise to optimize your well-being.
After Justin Bieber was presented with the prize for “Favorite Male Singer” at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards on Saturday, he was literally slammed with slime. And it didn’t help that actor Will Smith held Bieber down to prevent his escape.
Now, we’re not talking any old wimpy slime bath. Bieber was pummeled with gallons upon gallons of slime from every angle of the stage. The slime explosion was so fierce that nearby fans got soaked, and even first lady Michelle Obama jumped out of the way to prevent slime from ruining her youthful, sparkly outfit.
Those watching the KCAs took to social media in response to Nickelodeon-crazy events like this. The awards show topped the charts with 1.6 million social mentions across the networks.
The data below is compliments of our friends at Trendrr, who measure specific TV show activity (mentions, likes, checkins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Miso. To see daily rankings, check out Trendrr.TV.
Mac and iOS users are going to be increasingly pushed to choose between storing their documents in iCloud or Dropbox. I expect that Apple will continue to push more and more features to iCloud that will make people want to use it, and I expect that Apple will continue to make iCloud easier and easier for iOS and Mac developers to use, so developers will want to support it.
I like the idea behind iCloud, but I don't really trust iCloud yet. Apple's previous attempts at online services have left me suspicious about iCloud's performance, reliability, and long-term future. I hope I'm wrong and that iCloud turns out to be great, but in the meantime, I know Dropbox, and I trust Dropbox.
One of my favorite features of Dropbox is the ability to go back and see revisions from the previous 30 days. It's my safety net.
The good news is that you can sync iCloud to Dropbox. The bad news is that it's a one-way sync from iCloud to Dropbox. But if all you want to do is backup iCloud files and be able to retrieve previous versions from Dropbox, it's pretty simple to do.
I'm going to use Byword as an example because it's fairly straight-forward, but the process should work roughly the same for any iCloud enabled Mac app.
Step One: Make sure iCloud is enabled. Go to System Preferences » iCloud and make sure that you have "Documents & Data" set to sync.
Step Two: Create an iCloud-based file. The exact process for this differs from app to app. Byword has a File » Move to iCloud menu item.
Step Three: Find the local iCloud folder. Here's where things get a little bit tricky. You have to get into the "Library" folder in your Home directory, but that folder has been hidden in Lion. Fortunately for you there are at least 18 ways to view that folder. My recommendation is to go to the Finder, select the "Go" menu, and press the Option/Alt key. When you do that, you'll see the Library folder appear. Or use ⌘ + Shift + G and type in "~/Library/" if you prefer keyboard shortcuts. Once you are in, look for a folder called Mobile Documents
You'll find something like the list of directories shown here. Inside each one is a "Documents" sub-directory. I bet you can guess what is stored in there.
Step Four: Sync changes via Hazel.Hazel was recently updated to version 3, and one of the new features is a 'sync' option. For those who don't know Hazel, you should, it's one of my irreplaceable apps. It allows you to create rules for all sorts of actions to happen in specific folders if different criteria are met. For example, Hazel can tell if a file has been modified since the last time Hazel checked a specific folder. If it has been modified, you can tell Hazel to do specific things, including "sync" from that folder, so another one.
Click on image for a larger size
I created a 'Byword' folder in my ~/Dropbox/ and then created a Hazel rule which says "If any files have been modified since we last checked (matched) this folder, then sync the 'Documents' folder (located inside ~/Library/Mobile Documents/) with the Byword folder in Dropbox.
Step Five:(Optional) While I was checking around inside ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ I used Default Folder X to set the Byword iCloud folder to be the default folder for all new Byword documents. Now whenever I create new document on my Mac using Byword, I know that it will automatically be saved to iCloud and Dropbox.
This isn't something that I will do for all of my iCloud-enabled apps, but I've been using Byword more and more lately for all sorts of writing projects, and I want to do everything I can to make sure that I am "covered" when it comes to saving my files. Two local copies (one in Mobile Documents, one in Dropbox folder) and two copies in the "cloud" (iCloud and Dropbox sync), plus 30 days worth of "undo"? (Not to mention that each of my Macs will have local copies as well, as iCloud and Dropbox sync across my network.) That's a system I can create and then forget about.
If you thought your Sunbeam electric blanket or those Hello Kitty foot warmers were advanced pieces of kit, then you'd best divert your eyes from this story out of the UK. In an effort to eliminate the mess of power cables and extraneous batteries from a soldier's tech gear, one British company is currently experimenting with conductive fabrics as the basis for future military uniforms. The material is able to deliver power to any number of devices -- all from a single battery -- and also features a redundancy aspect, with the ability to reroute power should the fabric become torn or damaged. The company, known as Intelligent Textiles, recently received a £234,000 grant from the Ministry of Defense and hopes to begin field trials of its equipment next month. While these high tech uniforms may see a limited military issue by year's end, it's thought unlikely that the gear will become widespread until 2014 or beyond.
New submitter smarq2 writes "Chessbase reports that chess programmer IM Vasik Rajlich has solved the King's Gambit chess opening with technical means. 3000 processor cores, running for over four months, exhaustively analyzed all lines that follow after 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 and came to some extraordinary conclusions."
Update: 04/02 22:11 GMT by U L : Skuto points out that this is the same person who was found guilty of plagarizing GNU Chess and Crafty.
Moviegoers are familiar with the fact that criminals want to talk outside and in person for fear of phones being tapped or bugs planted in buildings. But what would you think if a silver screen mafioso said, “We don’t talk in here; I just bought a new toaster”?
That’s not that far off.
The New York Times has a great in depth profile of Nuance Communications, the Burlington company behind Siri’s voice recognition technology, that both highlights the company’s dominance in that space and raises a number of interesting issues about the technology. For Nuance, Siri and its competitors are just the beginning:
Mr. Sejnoha, the company’s chief technology officer, and other executives are plotting a voice-enabled future where human speech brings responses from not only smartphones and televisions, cars and computers, but also coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and other smart devices and appliances.
Useful and terrifying in equal measure. It’d be great to finally make the television remote obsolete, but do we want a full audio record of what goes on in the privacy of our homes? That may be where we’re headed, as Nuance claims “aside from the federal government, it has amassed the largest archive of recorded speech in the United States.”
The full article is well worth a read as it details the company’s history (it’s an acquisition machine) and discusses other risks of speaking to computers, including some experts’ worry that it could be psychologically confusing for people.
As with most questions like this, my own hope is that technology can address the problems it generates. Nuance’s Dragon TV product idly records what’s being said so it can get better at speech recognition, but you can imagine any number of ways around this. Either customers could opt out, or the system could delete conversations on a regular basis.
Welcome to the wild world of mainstream voice recognition, where your microwave complains you two don’t talk anymore.
These days you can barely move for smart television sets, as every TV manufacturer tries to wow us by producing the snazziest, most-connected screens on the market.
“When smart TVs came out I was really quite enthused by it all,” Anthony Rose, the co-founder of hot social TV app Zeebox — and a former head of the BBC’s iPlayer project — told me over the weekend. “But that enthusiasm really has declined for me, because they have failed to embrace what technology can offer.”
He thinks that making TVs ape computers by adding apps and proprietary controls and interfaces has caused a war between manufacturers and broadcasters that has “halted innovation.”
“You can buy your beautiful, new connected TV, and you can either be in the one area that watches live TV, or, 18 clicks later, you can be in the app store and do something else — and no one ever goes to the app store,” he said. “On my iPad it takes about 60 seconds for zero cost to be trying some new application.
“I think innovation will flourish here and that in the future your TV will be a beautiful but dumb hi-res panel that will play the content it is told to by your smartphone or tablet.”
Focused on the question of where the emerging investment trends were in this area, the answers from the panelists — Rose was joined by Ralph Eric Kunz of Catagonia Capital, an investor in German video discovery app Tweek.tv — came loud and clear.
While many are still focused on the disruption of distribution, such as IPTV or video on demand, that area is mostly covered now, they said: The future lies in developing new and interesting ways to use the plumbing.
“It feels very much like the music space 10 years ago,” said Kunz, who was one of the architects of German media group Bertelsmann’s purchase of Napster a decade ago.
“I think this whole plumbing era is the necessary prerequisite for the innovation era. The interesting thing is how established industry . . . is actually going to hedge their bets. There’s a lot of value in the old world that’s going to be destroyed.
“Without knowing what the future will look like, I think this ‘second screen’ will be a complementary way of looking at content — in some circumstances it might even be the ‘first screen.’ I think that’s one of the fascinating innovation areas of the future, to figure out how those screens interact with each other.”
His belief is that this will come in large part through social innovations and applications that provide a companion experience to big screen viewing — hence the investment in Tweek, which recently launched an iPad app for finding video content that you might want to watch.
“I think in the end, the question will be: Is the selection process, are the criteria for selection, the ways I select, going to change? I think Facebook plays a strong role in that today, but we don’t know what that’s going to look like in the future. Tweek TV goes in that direction, to build an interface that is focused on moving content in order to make a much better selection process in future.”
Broadcasters could be cut out of the loop
Meanwhile, Rose said he believed the big disruption in TV was happening at the human level, because technology means that program producers are now able to access audiences in ways that weren’t possible before.
“Back in the old days before the Internet, the audience would engage with the broadcaster — the broadcaster created a channel and an aggregation and schedule things, and the audience were there and the broadcaster would buy content, and the content provider or owner really had no direct audience engagement. Then came the Internet and the makers of Glee could set up a website — but they were disconnected. Now with the rise of second-screen viewing, with companion viewing, there’s a way for the content producer to connect directly to the audience.”
Large producers can now create applications and experiences that audiences can use that deepen their link to the program, he said. And that could leave broadcasters becoming little more than a pipeline.
“The broadcaster, who today is a distributor, a channel and a content provider, may ultimately be like an ISP, and the audience engages directly with the program maker. That’s one way it may play out.”