GoPro and NHL Teaming up to bring first person perspective to Televised games.→

Honestly, I have never seen a marketing team smarter/more effective than the people at GoPro.  

Whether you're watching professional hockey,  or watching a dude jump from space,  there is always a GoPro involved.   They have made the word synonymous with rugged cameras in the same way band-aid became synonymous with adhesive bandages.  Brilliant.  Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's a fantastic little camera as well.

Elon Musk: To the people in New Jersey

From Tesla's own Elon Musk on their website today:

On Tuesday, under pressure from the New Jersey auto dealer lobby to protect its monopoly, the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, composed of political appointees of the Governor, ended your right to purchase vehicles at a manufacturer store within the state. Governor Christie had promised that this would be put to a vote of the elected state legislature, which is the appropriate way to change the law. When it became apparent to the auto dealer lobby that this approach would not succeed, they cut a backroom deal with the Governor to circumvent the legislative process and pass a regulation that is fundamentally contrary to the intent of the law.

Well written.  This seems like some of the scummiest back door dealing I've seen in quite some time.   Best question for anyone who tries to argue this story to you:   Why can I go into an Apple Store and buy an iPad,  but I can't go into a Tesla Store and buy a Tesla?

Seems simple enough.

Archival Disc Format - Finally!

Read a great piece today on the newly announced Archival Disc Format.

Move over, Blu-ray: Sony and Panasonic have just announced a new optical disc specification with even higher storage capacities. The new "Archival Disc" format promises to store between six and 20 times the data of a standard 50GB dual-layer Blu-ray disc. Unlike Blu-ray, this new format is intended primarily for professional, archival use. The companies first announced that they would be working on this then-nameless standard together in July of 2013.

"Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored," reads the release. "They also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. This makes them robust media for long-term storage of content."

First-wave Archival Discs are slated to launch in summer of 2015 and will be able to hold up to 300GB of data. By comparison, the largest commonly available Blu-Ray discs use the 100GB and 128GB BDXL format. Archival Discs will apparently be double-sided, so this works out to 150GB of data per side. Future versions of the technology will improve storage density, increasing to 500GB (or 250GB per side) and 1TB (500GB per side) as the standard matures.

As a professional photographer,  this seems like nothing short of a godsend.   So far there has been no truly good way of archiving old work besides maintaining ever growing stacks of hard drives which need to be cloned and replaced as they age, burning multiple DVDs or BluRays per job which can be extremely time consuming,  as well as utilizing expensive cloud storage options to store multiple terabytes of raw photos.  This disc format could allow for a nice and simple way of archiving a lot of data in a short amount of time in a very small space.   Instead of going back and digging through a card catalog of DVDs, looking for DVD 3 of 8 of a certain job,  it could be much easier to simply find the 1TB archive disc that holds all of the work for a month,  or a quarter.  I'm looking forward to keeping a close eye on the development of this.

The Napster of Movies?

Could the new Mac app "Popcorn Time" be on the verge of becoming the Napster of movies?  Becoming the app that makes film piracy so easy that it becomes mainstream?  Yannick Lejacq of Motherboard seems to think so.

Popcorn Time, which is currently available in beta form for Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or higher, is pretty much identical to Netflix for all intents and purposes. The only difference is that all of the content therein is pirated, of course.

According to the site's FAQ, it's designed to download and stream torrented video that's "buried in a secret folder somewhere in your drive until you restart your computer," at which point it's deleted. In essence, it's a torrent client dressed up with a better presentation. At face value, Popcorn Time has the potential to be truly huge.

Then again, something makes me think that the wide availability of streaming services like Amazon Instant Video and Netflix will damper some of the enthusiasm for this product.   Though it may be enough to start to get movie studios to add their newer catalog to those streaming services a bit sooner than before.   Which would be a plus for consumers.   Either way I think the authors of the software are way too optimistic that they won't be creating too much controversy.  We shall see.