Purveyor of fluffy, family-friendly feature films, Walt Disney has become the latest Hollywood studio to offer movies for sale on the Internet, with a new service offering films via the CinemaNow online service.
CinemaNow, based in sunny Santa Monica, California, has announced that Buena Vista Home Entertainment – Disney’s home video division – will be offering movies on a download-to-own basis for PCs/portable devices on the same day they are available on DVD.
Starting from today, Disney will be offering both new and back catalogue fillums via CinemaNow, with pricing set around the same price as DVDs (roughly $20 for a new release, and $10 for older films.)
Of course, studios tend to have a different concept of ‘ownership’ than the rest of us when it comes to all things digital, and in this case punters still won’t be able to do what they actually want to do, and that’s to burn their downloaded copies onto DVDs.
Instead, the movies can only be copied to a total of three other devices (including laptop PCs and handheld electronic devices) supporting CinemaNow’s copyright-protection technology.
Disney’s shuffle into the world of online film flogging follows a 3rd April announcement by rival studios to offer movies for sale via Movielink, a joint venture owned by big-league competitors Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount Pictures.
Visibly purring with satisfaction, Bruce Eisen, president of CinemaNow, rubbed up against the mic, saying, “The main thing is Disney chose us to be first for them to go out with electronic sell-through.”
“We take that as a real nice vote of confidence,” he added, before trotting off to the litter tray.
A Disney spokesman said their deal with CinemaNow is a non-exclusive one, so they’re free to make similar deals with other online services in the future.
Dandruff shakers looking forward to some geriatric rocking with Guns’n’Roses at the Hammersmith Apollo tomorrow night can forget all about keeping their tickets as a memento after the show.
Moreover, we don’t even like the idea of having tickets on our mobiles. What happens if your battery runs out, or if you delete your text message by accident?
Regardless of what punters want, The Man is pressing ahead for a bright virtual ticket future, with O2 working with technology provider, Mobiqa to provide m-tickets to this month’s O2 Wireless Festival in London – and in their first week, they managed to shift a hefty £100,000 worth of the things.
Look, we know there’s something a bit sad about wanting a PC that glows brightly with useless dials, flashing lights and obscure read outs, but we just couldn’t hide our juvenile excitement when we saw this new gizmo from Japanese manufacturer Scythe.
The panel is dominated by a large, circular colour LCD display giving readouts for computer temperature (centigrade/Fahrenheit, with up to four temperature sensors supported), fan speed, warning temperature and current time.
Pricing and availability to be announced. We’ll take two please!
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Japanese manufacturers Suekage are hoping that their new SOIOS 55-Cam 360’s unique ability to provide panoramic viewing angles and then relay them to 3G phones may make them a hit in the home security market.
Well, that’s what their blurb said, and we’re not in the mood to get out a protractor and argue the toss, but that basic principle is: big curvy mirror = 360 coverage.
The advantage of this system is that the webcam’s 360 degree all-seeing eye does away with the need for expensive motorised systems
Some details of Sony’s eagerly-awaited debut into the dSLR market have begun to emerge online.
This feature – inherited from Minolta -begins autofocus and auto-exposure as soon as it detects your peeper gazing through the viewfinder. Neat
The onboard high-speed autofocus is said to sport 4 focus modes – Single-shot AF; Direct Manual Focus; AF Automatic; AF Continuous – with centre-weighted, spot and 40-segment honeycomb pattern metering modes.
There’s been some deep rumblings of discontent from tens of thousands of customers trying to sign up to Carphone Warehouse’s offer of “free” broadband.
The TalkTalk offer gives punters unlimited landline telephone calls and broadband access for £20 per month, with a one-off £29.99 connection fee.
The Independent has reported that chatrooms have been “inundated” with punters venting their frustration over their attempts to sign up to the service, with the TalkTalk website offering a rueful apology on their website:
Adobe has made available a proof-of-concept version of their new productivity tool, 
As bloggers 
Google Earth/Maps
It’s uncertain how much information they do store, but it could be quite considerable. They actually might not know it’s you personally, but your computer. Google uses cookies which are used to track your personalisation settings, but they can store a lot more info, though Google are likely to just use the cookie as the identifier which enables them to quickly personalise things.Just looking at the information they could store when you do a search, it’s the search criteria itself, then which sites you clicked through to. But that can be combined with other info like what Google Map info you looked at, who you emailed through Google Mail and your previous search history. That may lead to a bleak picture if you’re committing illegal acts.The other side to it all is that the processing of all this information is extremely resource hungry and though Google are particularly good at correlating information, they might not bother. They will for some aspects, but most of the time it’s probably not worth it and they’ll keep succinct summarized information.If the authorities want to know what your doing, it’s actually much easier for them to go to your ISP and request the information from them (if they are running caching equipment which speeds up Web access for all users, they don’t just know what searches you’ve been doing, but every Website you’ve accessed and everything you’ve down or uploaded).The Future 
“Would you like a single piece of sheet music that contains all your favourite pieces, and never needs to be turned over?”
The universal piece of music wasn’t even the first prize winner in this competition. It was a contest sponsored by one of the world’s leading e-paper technology designers, Plastic Logic, which has demonstrated a flexible sheet of A5 “paper” that has the contrast and readability of real paper, the flexibility of soft cardboard, and the power consumption of a watch. And the prize went to something that is, in the end, “just a book.”
When you invent a new technology, you always start off by producing something which you know has a market already, and which you think you can do better.