David Lidsky's Blog, page 4886

Dailymotion Latest Target in EMI's Shotgun Approach to Music Videos

EMI, long time YouTube-phobe, has just announced a new music video partnership with Dailymotion. It'll kick off in April, and means Dailymotion users on the desktop and in iPhone apps will get access to EMI's huge video library.

The companies' press release makes a meal out of the bigness of this deal--EMI "one of the world's leading music companies" and DailyMotion "one of the largets online video companies in the world" are partnering to bring music vids to D's website, iPhone app and the...

"Bobwheeling" Campaign Is a Failed Attempt to Promote Carbon Offsets

It seems obvious enough: the Winter Olympics require winter to work. With no snow and no ice, it's pretty hard to have the games go on. But Offsetters, the Official Carbon Offset Supplier of the Vancouver 2010
Olympics, is milking the idea with the tongue-in-cheek "Bobwheeling" campaign. Essentially, Bobwheeling is bobsledding without the ice. Because climate change will make it so that real winter doesn't exist, so we'll eventually need to think of some new winter sports for the Olympics...

Test Driving Google Buzz: How Does Facebook Compare?

Buzz has some great rich-media sharing capabilities. But Facebook still owns your social-sharing network.

Yesterday, Google unveiled Buzz, a new service for sharing short updates that's been immediately billed as direct competition for both Twitter and--more interestingly--Facebook. Today, Buzz has just begun trickling out into the real world. So how does the service stack up with Facebook? Here's a quick review.

If you're not familiar with Buzz, it's basically like a Twitter/Facebook feed...

How Much Nicotine Are You Getting With That Electronic Cigarette?

Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, as they're commonly called, have been giving the FDA the shakes for almost a year now.

But as the regulatory debate over the tobaccoless nicotine delivery systems rages on, a new issue has come to
light: How much nicotine, if any, are these e-cigarettes actually sending
into users' brains? When the FDA did their lab analysis, they found
e-cigarettes contained much higher concentrations of nicotine per puff
compared to previously approved nicotine...

Is Disney vs. Cable the New Macmillan vs. Amazon?

Some of Disney's CEO Bob Iger's words at the Disney's financial call may have cable industry execs a little nervous. Bob wants Disney to get more more in fees from them--is he following in the footsteps of Macmillan in the Amazon saga?

Responding to questions about the kind of cash Disney collects from cable companies as retransmission fees, Bob really didn't mince words much: He believes his company "has an obligation to derive value from the great investment that we make in these programs...

Iran: Looking Towards a Bright Future?

True, every picture tells a story. But which one?

The front-page photo in Monday's Wall Street Journal gave me a chill. Did Iran detonate a nuclear device? The Cold War era image of stern men donning protective glasses shielding them from an atomic blaze came to mind.

The headline read "Iran Points Up Its Nuclear Challenge to the West." However, given this bizarre picture any of the following headlines could have, at first glance, been a viable alternative:

"President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

Lights, Camera, Action: Take the Living Climate Change Challenge

Sure, An Inconvenient Truth turned people's attention towards those melting ice caps, but it was such a downer! The Living Climate Change Video Competition hopes to launch a positive, design-centered conversation about climate change through the power of user-created videos.

The competition is sponsored by IDEO and hosted by Design 21, and the judges include all sorts of design, sustainability and culture luminaries like Allan Chochinov, editor in chief of Core77.com, Gary Hustwit, director...

"Miracle Machine" Brings Clean Water to Haiti

Atmospheric water generators, or machines that extract water from humid air, have been around for awhile--we wrote about Atmospheric Water Systems' 11-stage filtration water generator last year, and Willie Nelson even sells his own atmospheric water generator. Now the pricey technology is being used where it can make a real difference--in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Aqua Sciences shipped over one of its atmospheric water extraction machines at the end of January, marking the first time the...

Best Buy Makes the Ultimate E-Cycling Billboard

Have you been to Times Square lately? You may have seen this Best Buy billboard. At first glance, it looks like just another billboard made out of funky bric-a-brac, but look a bit closer and you'll notice that it's made out of old electronics, including VHS players, bulky computer monitors, and all sorts of other outdated products.

The ultra-clever billboard advertises Best Buy's recycling program, which accepts broken, obsolete, and old electronics from from any store or manufacturer...

Google Buzz: "Are You at Work? How About a $.99 Big Mac From McDonald's, Three Blocks Away?"

You're waking up to an Internet a-Buzz with talk about Google's new social sharing experiment. Opinions are mixed, but mainly concern the current version of Buzz. So here's our thought experiment about its future. It's scary.

Google's Buzz presentation started by showing its desktop implementation, and demonstrated how Buzz will be threaded through the Gmail accounts of Google users, acting as a life-casting/status-updating tool, a content-sharing system, and a chat tool. Right off the bat it...