Posts Tagged ‘cinema’

Shane Black, the celebrated action movie screenwriter and director of Iron Man 3 , has signed on to helm Doc Savage — a film adaptation of the pulp comic series from the 1930s and 1940s. Sony Pictures announced the deal Tuesday, confirming that Black will direct and co-write the film, with Neal H. Moritz, Ori Marmur, and Michael Uslan serving as producers. Continue reading…

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‘Iron Man 3′ director signs on for ‘Doc Savage’ adaptation

Iron Man 3 performed heroically at the box office over the weekend, posting the second-highest domestic opening of all time, and already surpassing Iron Man 2 in gross global revenue. As the Wall Street Journal reports , the third installment of the Tony Stark saga pulled in an estimated $175.3 million in ticket sales across Canada and the US last weekend, second only to The Avengers , which saw a $207.4 million opening last year. Analysts say the film likely won’t overtake the $1.5 billion that The Avengers totaled worldwide, though it is on track to gross more than $1 billion, after taking in $680.1 million in global ticket sales after 12 days. Iron Man 2 , by comparison, grossed a total of $624 million in worldwide box office sales

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‘Iron Man 3′ blows away the box office with $175 million opening weekend

If you’ve seen any movie produced within the past four decades, you’re probably already familiar with the Steadicam shot. Invented by Garrett Brown in the early 1970s, the camera mount stabilizer has played an integral role in contemporary filmmaking, though given its ubiquity nowadays, its impact often goes under appreciated. Refocused Media is hoping to change that, with a new compilation video called The Art of the Steadicam . Released online earlier this week, the video eschews narrative history or cinematographic explainers in favor of a simpler, and more viscerally effective compilation

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‘The Art of the Steadicam’ pays tribute to beautiful cinematography

Walmart is facing new competition in the disc-to-digital conversion market from rival big-boxer Best Buy. Engadget reports that the company’s CinemaNow service will give users the added convenience of converting DVDs from home. Currently in beta, the CinemaNow software will let you insert a DVD into your Mac or Windows PC’s optical drive (assuming you have one) and, after linking an UltraViolet account, grab an SD or HD digital copy to watch either on- or offline. The prices are on par with Walmart’s (although the list of titles isn’t exactly the same), so if you’ve been thinking of converting your discs, CinemaNow could save you a trip, and save your DVDs an unfortunate tattoo . Unfortunately, though, international readers are…

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Best Buy enters disc-to-digital race with CinemaNow, lets you convert DVDs from home

Back in October we took a look at the Philips Hue — a customizable LED array that lets you manipulate which bulbs turn on when, and with what colors and intensities, all from your smartphone. Now, the company is showing what’s possible with the other white light — OLED — in a new video (below), courtesy of Dezeen . The big difference between OLED and other light sources, even LED, is that it enables a whole surface to emit light, rather than just a point, “so for the first time, people don’t need a system to spread the light, the system is, so to say, built in,” said Philips’s Dietmar Thomas.

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Watch this: Philips illuminates the future with impossibly-thin OLEDs

An FCC filing has revealed yet another addition to Lenovo’s growing catalog of tablet devices: the IdeaTab S2109A (not to be confused with the IdeaTab S2 ). While details are scarce, Engadget cites an unnamed source as saying that the tablet will feature a 9.7-inch IPS display with a 4:3 aspect ratio, four built-in speakers, and a Texas Instruments OMAP chip. It will reportedly also run Ice Cream Sandwich and launch by the end of March.

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9.7-inch Lenovo IdeaTab revealed in FCC filing, rumored to launch this month

Google’s minimalist home page leaves unknown layers of complexity to the imagination, but now you can dive into some of the mystery behind Google search: the company has released uncut video footage from its internal weekly search meeting, where Google engineers discuss possible improvements and make decisions about its search product. In this particular discussion, Google employees ponder something seemingly minor — how to perform search spell checks with more than ten terms in a search query — but as it turns out there are myriad issues with making even small changes to the system. If you’ve ever wondered how the brain trust at Google gets together to solve problems, now’s your chance. Continue reading…

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Watch Google employees talk about search algorithms

South Korea’s SK Telecom is planning to distribute the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update to Galaxy S II owners starting at 10AM local time tomorrow, March 13th. This information was tweeted for the whole world to see earlier this morning, but the offending tweet has since been pulled. We’ve kept a screenshot for posterity and have also taken a look at some documents on SK Telecom’s internal website that confirm the date and time of the download. With all of that preparation in place, the only reason we can deduce for SK deleting its tweet is that Samsung is uncomfortable with having information about the update announced by a carrier instead of Samsung itself.

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Galaxy S II Ice Cream Sandwich update on SK Telecom planned for tomorrow

Larry King Live ended its 25-year run in 2010, but the former CNN interviewer is set to make his comeback to television — internet television, that is. The New York Times is reporting that Mexican telecoms billionaire Carlos Slim is funding an online network called Ora.tv, which will be formally announced on Monday. King is the prime talent acquisition, and his new show is said to “partly resemble” Larry King Live. The advertising-supported network will launch at an unspecified point this year, and will be broadcast to computers, mobile devices, and television sets.

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New online TV network from ‘world’s richest man’ will bring Larry King out of retirement

A group of Googlers showed off some never-before-seen design prototypes today at SXSW that showed a very different design direction from what was recently rolled out across the Google universe. While 2011′s launch, dubbed “Strawman,” was one of the biggest in the company’s history, Google made similar efforts to redesign the company’s entire stock of sites in 2007 with the Kanna project. An Icelandic term that means “to explore, to examine, to investigate,” Kanna found the Google team building prototypes across four main clusters: fun, organization, daring, and minimalism (start at slide 5 below). Though the panelists didn’t go into much detail as to why Google didn’t push any of the designs live in 2007, they hinted at a lack of… Continue reading…

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The Google that never was: how the search giant killed a 2007 redesign

Most of the Boondock Saints Video Game panel at SXSW Interactive’s Screenburn Arcade did not actually have much to do with the video game based on the Boondock Saints . Rather, a good 45 minutes of the 48-or-so minute-long presentation was dedicated to a Q&A in which stars Sean Patrick Flanery (Connor MacManus), Norman Reedus (Murphy MacManus) and David Della Rocco (Rocco) fielded questions from the franchise’s most diehard fans. These questions, for the most part, largely concerned propositions towards the panel’s hosts, or requests for the reciting of lines from the films. A young woman requested a hug from one of the men, the woman who followed requested a kiss, and the next asked if one of the men wanted to “do something later.” It… Continue reading…

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The Boondock Saints Video Game debuts at SXSW

The ever-elusive panorama. It’s been the future of photography since QuickTime 4, it seems like, and now the SpinCam team has really solved it . Kind of, at least. Taking a cue from Instagram ‘s easy method of capturing and sharing photos from within an app, SpinCam lets you shoot a 360° scene (either revolving around an object, or spinning in place yourself) and then share that “Spin” on Facebook and with your SpinCam buddies. The actual panoramic technology is ultra simple: there is none

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SpinCam app for iOS captures and shares 360° scenes

We’ve seen PayPal trial two different point-of-sale transaction services recently — one was NFC-based and the other utilized PINs — but, according to a post on PayPal’s blog, the company has much more in store for digital wallets. The company says its new service will let you take money and “connect it, filter it, personalize it, share it and make it work the way that you want it to.” That’s awfully general, but thankfully the company does provide a few specifics. One feature will let you make a purchase and determine how you’d like to pay for it up to five or seven days later — even if you want to combine different payment methods (including gift cards and reward points) or set up installments.

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PayPal’s new ‘intelligent wallet’ to let you choose a payment method seven days after transaction

We’ve seen PayPal trial two different point-of-sale transaction services recently — one was NFC-based and the other utilized PINs — but, according to a post on PayPal’s blog, the company has much more in store for digital wallets. The company says its new service will let you take money and “connect it, filter it, personalize it, share it and make it work the way that you want it to.” That’s awfully general, but thankfully the company does provide a few specifics. One feature will let you make a purchase and determine how you’d like to pay for it up to five or seven days later — even if you want to combine different payment methods (including gift cards and reward points) or set up installments. The “intelligent wallet” will also… Continue reading…

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PayPal’s new ‘intelligent wallet’ to let you choose a payment method seven days after a transaction

Ant colonies are amazing, beautiful, complicated things. Flatbed scanners, on the other hand, well, they’re basically the opposite of all that. Five years ago, François Vautier “installed” an ant colony inside an old scanner he had, and let the ants do their thing. Once a week, for five years, he scanned the proceedings, and watched as the ants’ nest invaded, and essentially ate the internals of the scanner itself. The resulting video is short and amazing.

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Ant colony living in a scanner for five years: time lapse video

Readability’s much-delayed iOS app made its debut just over a week ago , and now the company’s following it with a brand-new app for Android phones and tablets. The free app will be available on Monday morning at 11AM ET, though if you want to download the app as soon as possible you’ll also need the Amazon Appstore on your device, where it will be exclusively available for the first week. That strategy is a nod from Readability to Amazon, aligning it with a company that’s done so much for readers.

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Readability for Android to be released Monday, Amazon Appstore-only for a week

Instapaper is our go-to method for saving articles to read later on a Mac, iPad, or iPhone. It scrapes away ads and other clutter to leave you with nothing but text — and guilt, because articles you intend to read later quickly pile up. UK software developer Dan W. has a solution for your unread article guilt. It’s called Instapaper Placebo , and it’s for “offloading all your good intentions

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Instapaper Placebo alleviates your link-saving guilt

Novelty in video games has a pretty short half-life – one that’s reduced by sequels with unchanging, mechanical formulas. Vita launch title Touch My Katamari is the seventh Katamari Damacy installment. Back in 2004, Katamari Damacy carried a near-unbearable amount of charm back in 2004, all whimsy and surrealism, piled on top of a clever, puzzle-action design that no other game had ever explored.

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Touch My Katamari Review – Slow your roll

Back in 2003, the world wasn’t quite ready for the original Planetside . It was ambitious, requiring a solid internet connection meaning the promise of having an FPS experience with several hundred other players at once was out of reach for most. Broadband was in its infancy, and the game failed to reach the popularity of other MMOs like EverQuest and WoW . Despite that, the original remains playable for a small and dedicated band of players on a single server. The developers of Planetside 2 are not interested in repeating that level of success

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Video: Planetside 2 dev on making free-to-play fair for cheapskates

It may not be a paperless office solution, but Toshiba has unveiled a more efficient printing system that features erasable toner. By feeding the paper through an erasing device you expose it to heat, which turns the toner invisible. Each sheet can be reused around five times and you can use any kind of paper, though every other piece of the set-up is proprietary — including the Toshiba-made printer, eraser, and toner. The eraser also has a built-in scanner so that you can make copies of pages before erasing them, and it automatically sorts erased paper so you know whether or not a sheet can be reused

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Toshiba developing printer system with erasable toner

Fujitsu claims that it has developed a new technology that allows for higher signal quality in fiber optic cables over longer distances, while consuming a whole lot less energy. The key to the puzzle is a “digital signal processing algorithm” that can both compensate for waveform distortion and extend the range of long-haul optical signals. The algorithm has allowed Fujitsu to create circuits that are five percent their regular size, and this decrease means that they also consume two-thirds less power. According to the company, in a 112Gbps transmission test it managed to achieve higher signal quality with its new one-stage circuit than with a standard 20-stage circuit. In theory, this technology could be used to create fiber optic..

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Fujitsu develops algorithm to make fiber optic networks two-thirds more energy efficient

We’re getting reports out of the UK this morning that the new iPad won’t be meeting its scheduled delivery date of March 16th, “despite [ Apple's ] best efforts and those of [its] shipping partners.” Our tipster was told that his updated delivery date is the following Tuesday, March 20th — but a quick search of Twitter suggests that a good number of people are being told the 21st as well. It’s unclear exactly what led to the delay; as with many Apple products, it’s reasonable to suspect that the company is producing and shipping the iPad at full tilt and it can only fly so many cargo planes out of Hong Kong per day, but that’s little consolation to those who’ve been put on hold. Thanks, theeoin ! Continue reading…

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New iPad arriving later than scheduled for some Europeans

That was quick. Yesterday we reported that Google’s Play rebrand of the Android Market may have inadvertently broke the Market shortcut links on some Motorola devices. Now it appears that a new update to Play (version 3.4.7) makes everything work the way it’s supposed to again. We can confirm that our RAZR Maxx and Droid X2 — the former of which Droid Life originally confirmed as having the problem — are both running Play Store 3.4.7, and the Market links on both redirect properly to the new store. The update to the new version of Play is being pushed out as we speak, but if for some reason you didn’t get it yet, you can pick it up it at the source link below

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Google Play update appears to fix broken Market links on Motorola devices

We’ve been hearing for a while about the convoluted processes involved in Western Digital’s acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies , but the saga is finally at an end. WD has announced that the merger is now complete in a deal worth $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million worth of shares (valued at $0.9 billion as of Wednesday). The deal was partly funded by a $2.5 billion five-year loan. What’s in it for Hitachi? While the company’s hard disk business has struggled since taking over from IBM in 2003, it now has around a 10% stake in WD and the right to appoint two people to the company’s board of directors.

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Western Digital completes $4.8b Hitachi GST buyout, becomes world’s largest HDD manufacturer

We’ve been expecting GPUs based on Kepler — Nvidia’s 28nm successor to the Fermi line — since the company first revealed the product’s existence back in 2010 . Things seem to be getting closer now, with Epic Games showing off a demo on Kepler hardware at this week’s Game Developers Conference, and details on the first shipping commercial product starting to leak. Heise Online is reporting that several manufacturers at the CeBIT expo stated that the first Kepler-powered card will be the GeForce GTX 680. Powered by the GK104 core, the card will reportedly ship with 2GB of GDDR5 memory connected via a 256-bit memory controller, and will feature 1536 CUDA cores.

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Details on Nvidia’s Kepler-powered GeForce GTX 680 GPU reportedly leak