Of the three major devices we connect to our TVs — gaming consoles, DVRs and DVD players — DVRs get by far the most use. While we’re watching less live TV than a few years ago, we now watch a full 19 minutes more per year of programming, just on our own schedules now.
Those statistics and more from a new Nielsen study reveal how TV-watching habits have changed with the growing popularity of DVRs.
“The percent of DVR usage has grown fivefold from a mere 1.6% in 2006 to almost 8% in 2011, and DVRs are adding time to our TV day by allowing us to watch shows airing at the same time. Leading the trend in DVR usage are females 18-54, who allot almost 10% of their TV viewing time to a DVR,” the study says.
SEE ALSO: 20 TV Shows With the Most Social Media Buzz This Week [CHART]
In 2006, DVR usage made up just 1.6% of TV time. Now it makes up 8% of our TV time, according to Nielsen.
The chart below breaks down the distribution percent of minutes using a television and its various connected devices, according to age demographics.
Check out the video above to learn more about the effect of DVRs.
Tell us in the comments: How often do you use a DVR? Do you think you watch more television — though likely fewer commercials — because of it? How has being able to record and fast forward changed your TV-watching habits?
Thumbnail image courtesy of mlabowicz via Flickr
More About: DVR, Nielsen, television For more Entertainment coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/01/nielsen-dvr-study/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_m...
Reports indicate that Apple is struggling to get media companies to sign on to its rumored streaming TV service. Speculation surrounding the service and its TV hardware component kicked off in December.
Citing unnamed sources, The New York Post says that media companies are unwilling to agree to Apple’s terms over content packages and pricing. “We decide the price, we decide what content” is Apple’s negotiating stance on the matter, says a source.
Little is known about the streaming service itself, which Apple has not confirmed that it is working on. It’s possible Apple is designing a service that would enable owners of iOS and Apple TV devices to purchase subscriptions to individual channels, similar to the way users can purchase subscriptions to newspapers and magazines via the Newsstand. Or Apple could bundle those channels together to create its own cable TV-like group subscription offering.
Currently, Apple allows users to purchase and download individual TV shows and movies through its iTunes Store. A streaming subscription service would accelerate users’ access to video content, and put Apple into more direct competition with the likes of Netflix and Hulu Plus, as well as cable TV providers.
Apple has had great success in cajoling the music industry to agree to licensing options on its terms — both with the iTunes Music Store and the iTunes Match service. The company has long struggled, however, to secure major deals with television and movie studios.
This struggle is not unique to Apple. In the past 12 months, increased competition in the subscription streaming space has shifted power from content distributors (i.e. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus) and to the content owners themselves. The net effect of this battle over content is that securing content deals is more expensive than ever.
Rumors indicate that Apple might be unveiling its next-generation Apple TV along with the iPad 3 at a press event on Mar. 7. Perhaps we’ll learn more about this rumored streaming service at that time.
BONUS: Apple TV Imagined with Magnificent Curved Screen
Slightly iMac Look
 From the front, it looks a bit like a conventional TV or all-in one Mac Click here to view this gallery.
Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, mishooo
More About: apple, Apple TV, Media, online television, online tutors, subscription streaming For more Entertainment coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/02/apple-streaming-tv-negotiations/?utm_source=fe...
As a science fiction enthusiast, reading is one of my favorite weekend activities. I especially enjoy short fiction, stories that I can consume in a single sitting without having to make a major time commitment. I rely on a number of excellent science fiction magazines to keep me stocked with a robust supply of imaginative works from a diverse community of writers.
Over the past two years, podcasting and ebooks have significantly changed the manner in which I consume science fiction. Amazon's Kindle platform has made it easier to maintain subscriptions to multiple publications and read them across all of my devices. Podcasts have given me a convenient way to listen to great stories when I'm traveling, eating, or working out.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/03/space-out-this-weekend-with-our-fa...
Spontaneous networking at South by Southwest (SXSW) sounds like a great idea until you realize that 32,000 people register each year for the Film and Interactive portion alone (add another 16,000 potential contacts if you plan to attend Music, as well).
A startup called Meeteor wants to help users sort through the the crowd in advance.
The company’s core product uses Facebook Connect to introduce people with common friends, interests, schools and work histories. It asks you which companies and industries you’d like to network with before making these matches.
On Friday, Meeteor is launching a special version of the service designed specifically for SXSW that instead asks users to define what they’re interested in talking about at the conference. Discussion topics, which are based on SXSW’s panel offerings, include mobile, web, user experience, crowdfunding and gamification.
After users define their interests, the app suggests other users who have noted similar ones. At about 48 hours after launching a splash page, the user pool is still modest. Only about 250 people have signed up.
Meeteor denotes if suggested contacts have something in common, such as friends or an alma mater. They can then introduce themselves through a personal message and make plans to meet up at the conference.
The networking bliss that ensues — argues Meeteor co-founder Philip Cortes — will trump mobile apps that make on-location connections.
“We connect you with the best possible people,” he says, “not just people who happen to be around you.”
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, gehringj
More About: Meteeor, sxsw, sxsw 2012 For more Business coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/02/meeteor/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed...
There are some things that you just don't want to send through regular email: your credit card number, your Social Security Number (if you live in the USA), and other messages that you really don't want anyone else to read. A new service and accompanying iPhone app, OneShar.es (US$0.99) provides a way to send encrypted top-secret information. Using the OneShar.es service is simple: you either go to the website or fire up the app, type in your message of up to 1000 characters, and a one-time URL is created. You send that URL to your recipient, and once they read the message, it can never be retrieved again. HTTPS encryption is used between the OneShar.es servers and the app (or your web browser) to keep your message encrypted in transit. OneShar.es says that "No service is 100% secure. However, we do take security extremely seriously." They also admit that Google Analytics is used on their site for web analytics, but "we, unfortunately, do not know who you are although we bet our users are rather great people." It's an interesting service and at $0.99 for the iPhone app (free to use in a browser), it's worth a try if you occasionally need to send sensitive information. [Via One Thing Well] Oneshar.es: For those messages that need to stay secret originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/03/02/oneshar-es-for-those-messages-that-need-to-sta...

Facebook’s much anticipated and first ever Facebook Marketing Conference, fMC, kicked off at 1PM this afternoon in New York City. We were excited to have been invited to the event, and take a first look at new Facebook products aimed at courting large businesses looking for an online media channel with the scale currently offered by television. With 845 million users across the globe who are spending an increasingly larger portion of their time on the social network, Facebook certainly fits the bill.
The Keynote: Facebook’s Impact on Society, through Storytelling.

The keynote began with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg eloquently outlining the internet’s impact on society, and Facebook’s role in introducing a platform where individuals are connected to other people and entities — ultimately providing them a voice on the web.
“When the internet happened, it changed our lives. It changed our lives around the provision of information,” she shared. “Technology is powering us; it’s powering who we are. This is a shift – a shift to the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends. … History is filled with examples of when individuals had a voice and made a difference. The difference now is that people can have this voice at scale.”
She set this stage to then outline how the Facebook platform is helping marketers forge deeper connections with individuals. Sandberg first spoke to the gaming industry, and how social completely transformed how people experience games and how that industry monetized. She moved to music next, stating how putting people at the center of the listening experience is transforming the industry.
She then handed the stage off to Chris Cox, VP Product at Facebook. Continuing in Sandberg’s storytelling, he admitted he was skeptical of Facebook’s ability when he initially interviewed.
“There was no media, Like buttons or farms,” he joked. “If you think of Facebook as a blue and white college dating site, you’re wrong.”
After walking people through why he bought into the Facebook vision, he spoke to the opportunities to make the world more social. Television was his first example, outlining how strange it is that we each go home to individually sort through channels to find something good to watch, when your neighbors, friends, families and colleagues are doing the same. What instead if you turned your TV on and saw that 15 of your friends are watching Always Sunny, your Mom recorded 60 Minutes for you, and that you missed Meryl Streep’s speech at The Oscars that everyone is talking about.
After painting a picture of the future of social, he introduced Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Global Business Marketing. Hofflinger spoke to the notion of how messaging people is changing from traditional ads into story-centric ads.
“Ads are good. But stories, it turns out, are better,” he stated. “One little story at a time brands are reaching consumers at scale [on Facebook].”
He then outlined Facebook’s three new announcements for marketers:
Pages are now rich, customizable Timeline experiences.
As Facebook reiterated throughout the afternoon, a brand’s Facebook Page is “mission control” for their identity, marketing and advertising on Facebook. The big announcement today was the release of Timeline for brands — functionality users currently enjoy on Facebook. Timelines offer a much more rich, and customizable canvas through which brands can communicate stories with their Fans. This is also the central point for turning post stories on a brand’s Page into ads (read on).
Reach Generator ensures a majority of your Fans see your Page posts.
Right now people see 16% of the engagement happening between people and other entities through their Facebook News Feeds; meaning, only a fraction of the posts brands make to their Pages actually get seen by their Fans. In order to ensure a majority of your Fans see your Page posts, Facebook has introduced Reach Generator. Facebook touts that Reach Generator will help brands reach 50% of their Fans in a week and 75% in a month.
What ensures this reach? A new ad format and placement. The content and creative of the ad product is generated from a post on a brand’s Page. This story post is sponsored into an ad format — larger than what is currently available — and featured:
- On the right side of the News Feed (available before)
- Within the News Feed (new)
- Within the mobile News Feed (new)
- On logout screens (new, to be released in April)
These story posts could be any type of content: videos, links, photos, offers — you name it. Facebook will help brands determine which message is best for them to amplify into the four featured placements above, and reporting will occur post-campaign. Facebook touts the ads receive 5-10 times the clickthrough rates of their current ad offerings. As for success stories, Facebook shared that the premium placement helped Ben & Jerry’s reach 97% of their Fans and increased sales by a 3-to-1 ROI ratio.
Premium allows you to go mass market, beyond Fans.
But what about mass market — those who aren’t your Fans? Enter Facebook’s new premium offering, which takes a page post and promotes it (in the above placements) to a much broader audience, including those users who are not currently your Fans. Collectively these new premium Facebook capabilities allow big brands with large budgets the opportunity to benefit from the mass scale currently generated through television broadcast online, on Facebook.
After a fireside chat between Sheryl Sandberg and Ken Chenault of American Express about leadership and innovation within large companies, VP Sales Carolyn Everson took the stage and concluded the conference by getting back to Facebook’s vision for marketing:
“Our vision for marketing is that its content is as good as the content you see from a family or friend member … Let your Fans become the biggest, best advocates you have.”
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/live-from-fmc-facebook-courts-big-brands-positio...
 Ever wanted to use AirPlay mirroring to show the screen of your iPad 2 or iPhone 4/4S on your Mac? Just released, Reflection ($14.99 for a single license, $39.99 for a 5 pack) offers a well-featured mirroring receiver for OS X, ideal for education and demos -- and a great way to eliminate the Frankencable for iPad video capture. I've been beta-testing Reflection for several weeks. I watched as David Stanfill (developer of AirParrot, which I introduced a few weeks ago on TUAW) refined and stabilized this app. With Reflection, you can project app demos to your Mac in real time. This is a great feature for any developer or teacher, or even for business folk who would like to bring along their presentations on their phone. I first wrote about Reflection a few weeks back on TUAW, and it received quite the warm welcome -- many of our readers asked when it would debut, and how they could purchase a copy. At that point, the app was just in its initial alpha release. It barely supported multiple resolutions and provided few options. What you get today is full mirroring, including audio, with orientation updates and many video optimization features as well as pseudo-frames that make the video on your desktop look as if it's running on an iPhone or iPad -- just as it would with the Xcode iOS simulator. It's not quite at a bulletproof release, but for day-to-day use for those of you who need these features now and are willing to deal with the occasional crash, it's a great solution as-is. AirParrot ($9.99 for a single license, $29.99 for a 5 pack), the app that mirrors your OS X desktop to Apple TV, has also undergone major changes since I first wrote it up. In the latest release (approximately version 1.2.1), you can now use your Apple TV as an separate external monitor, not just for mirroring desktops. AirParrot also now supports audio mirroring and perceptual smoothing. These are great feature bumps to an already useful app. Correction: only the iPhone 4S is supported for mirroring, not the iPhone 4. Reflection app goes live, brings iOS screen mirroring to your Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/29/reflection-app-goes-live-brings-ios-screen-mir...
About a year and a half ago, the MIT Media Lab got a bunch of press for building a series of Bluetooth-enabled wallets designed to help promote responsible spending. One model, for instance, becomes physically harder to open as its user gets closer to the end of his or her monthly budget.
“We have trouble controlling our consumer impulses,” reads the project’s website, “and there’s a gap between our decision and the consequences.” Few consumers would argue with that. While the wallets are neat, the dawn of mobile payment technology promises to make them irrelevant. But, as our smartphones begin to double as wallets, the insight behind the Media Lab project – that technology can help us spend more wisely – will become more relevant than ever. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a whole slew of apps in the next few years in what I think of as the “good behavior” layer of mobile purchasing.
The fact is, we as consumers have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to how we spend our money. We buy junk food rather than nutritious meals; we spend too much on stuff and too little on experiences; we spring for a cup of coffee even though we swore we’d start making it at home; we don’t save nearly as much as we should, be it for retirement, education, or buying a house.
Pychologists and behavioral economists have studied the many ways in which we fail to optimize our financial decision-making, by succumbing to advertising or forming bad habits. But they’ve also prescribed things we can do to resist temptation.
In his book Predictably Irrational, behavioral economist Dan Ariely recommended a novel tactic to avoid impulsive credit card spending: put your credit card in a glass of water, then put the glass in your freezer. That way you’re unable to act immediately on your impulses; you’re forced to wait for your card to thaw before you can make any purchases. (This strategy was also employed by the main character in the 2009 film Confessions of a Shopaholic.) Ariely’s point in mentioning the “ice glass” method is not just to note the obvious – that we’re bad at sticking to our financial goals – but to suggest that we can employ tactics to help us save more, shop smarter, etc.
As wallets are replaced by smartphones, there’s no reason we can’t design apps to freeze our payments in just this way. Imagine if you could create a budget that would then be enforced by your phone. The software would simply not allow you to spend more than $X per month on shoes, or fast food, or whatever it was you wanted to cut down on. Or perhaps you wouldn’t “unlock” the ability to pay for dessert unless your phone recorded via GPS that you’d walked more than two miles that day (are you reading this RunKeeper?) Or before buying $200 worth of clothes at the mall, you have to watch a video of the tropical island that you’re saving up to visit. Still think you need all those shirts?
You could even self-impose your own personal “tax” on certain vices. Want to buy a cheeseburger? It’ll cost you an extra $5, which gets funneled directly to your IRA. The point is that the consumer would be empowered to set his or her own limits on spending in order to curb impulsive decision-making and meet financial goals.
All this might seem fanciful, but it really isn’t.
“The shift in consumer behavior with the rapid adoption of smartphones is undeniable,” Andrew Paradise, CEO of AisleBuyer, told me by email. AisleBuyer’s mobile technology lets shoppers scan items to learn more information about them before purchasing, and while much of the attention in this space is thus far around discounts, loyalty programs, and the like, there’s no reason the same technologies can’t be applied to improve consumer behavior.
Even with mobile payment in its infancy, there is one company here in Boston already focused on this space. Its name is ImpulseSave, and it allows users to transfer money from checkings into savings via text message, in an attempt to turn the idea of impulsive financial decision-making on its head.
“The entire world is designed to get you to spend more,” said Phil Fremont-Smith, co-founder and CEO of ImpulseSave. “Now we’re seeing, finally, the birth of a new generation of initiatives and products that are trying to level the playing field for the consumer.”
He believes that by simply making saving as easy as spending, consumers will begin to do it more.
“A great portion of the battle is the simplicity of literally making the act of doing something good with your money just as easy and accessible and present as the option to spend,” he told me.
We’ve already seen web tools that help people motivate themselves, like stikK, founded by Yale economists, that sells “Commitment Contracts” whereby users can incentivize themselves to reach their goals by putting some money on the line that they generally only recoup if the goal is met.
But even that is rudimentary compared to what mobile phones, and in particular mobile purchasing, makes possible. When your wallet is a computer, the limits of how it can help influence and even helpfully restrict what you buy are endless. All you need are apps designed to keep you on your best behavior.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/03/01/the-good-behavior-layer-how-mobile-can-save-us...
Those of you who know my writing will know that I don't use many analogies. Analogies have a very useful place in helping people understand difficult concepts, but they also have a tendency to be a end up strained beyond their limits. Now, imagine how I would react to a whole new field of physics that might be best described as "physics by analogy."
The whole field is based on the premise that, when two physically very different situations can be described using the same mathematical model, the conclusions drawn from one situation can be applied to the other. Unfortunately, this is usually applied in situations where the physics in one situation—black holes, for instance—are so extreme that it is difficult, if not impossible, to test any of the conclusions.
It appears I must adjust my attitude and admit that the field as a whole is not useless. I reached this conclusion after reading a paper that uses sound propagation in Bose Einstein condensates (BEC) to throw light on the origin of the largest discrepancy between two calculations ever seen.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/cosmological-constant-in-a-bose-e...
A lot of sales organizations still use a feature-function-benefit or pre-defined “solution” approach to selling. This type of pitch assumes buyers are already familiar with sales people’s products. It also assumes that buyers know what they want and are ready to buy.
from Mass High Tech Newspaper | Mass High Tech: The Voice of New England Innovation http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2012/02/27/daily16-Ditch-the-Pitch-How-to...
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