Report: Disney in talks to join Hulu
The Walt Disney Company is discussing a deal to take an equity stake in Hulu in exchange for providing the video portal with ABC programming, according to a published report.
Citing unnamed sources, news blog PaidContent says that it’s not clear how much of ABC’s content would be involved, but a final deal could include ESPN, the sports cable behemoth that has been a goldmine for Disney.
Representatives from Disney and Hulu were not immediately available.
The talks between the two companies reportedly are "serious," but a final deal has not been reached, according to two of PaidContent’s sources.
In the year since launching, Hulu has quickly risen to the top ranks of online video. The site is currently backed by News Corp., parent company of Fox and NBC Universal.
Source: CNET News
California May Ban Black Cars
The California legislature is considering regulating the color of cars and reflectivity of paint to reduce the energy requirements to cool them. A presentation on the proposed legislation by the California Air Resources Board is below.
The problem isn’t the color per se, but the reflectivity of the paint overall. And dark colors just don’t reflect well, so they are likely out. “Jet black remains an issue,” says the report.
Anyone who’s ever entered a very hot car knows that it can be cooled down immediately by driving a few feet with the windows open, effectively neutralizing any color-caused heat issues before engaging the air conditioner. But whatever, black is evil.
The new regulations would be phased in beginning in 2012, so if you want that black car, you better buy it soon. More on Autoblog and CrunchGear.
And you thought that black Toyota Pious you bought made you such a good person. Think again, you tree hating energy slob. Luckily, black websites are still ok, even though they, too, use more energy.
[ed]Wow, I think Batman might get screwed in this deal![/ed]
Source: TechCrunch.
Gaming Great Jane McGonigal Challenges the Industry: Make People Happier
Along with the usual news and excitement of the Game Developers Conference, going on this week in San Francisco, a speech by gaming guru Jane McGonigal stands out for one reason: She challenged game designers to actually make gamers happier.
McGonigal, the self-described "game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being" and one of the 20 Most Important Women in Gaming, planted the seeds for GDC speech on her blog Avant Game. "Reality is broken. Why aren’t game designers trying to fix it?" But if you think the argument is just another run-of-the-mill criticism of the violence, tension and attendant gore that pervades most videogames, then you’re going to be sadly disappointed.
Instead, McGonigal has a set out a sequence of design challenges to future gamemakers run to the heart of what a game could be about: entertainment, boosting human happiness, and having real-world impact.
She explains that games can "fix" broken reality by making artificial reality "happier, smarter, more engaging, and more resilient." Given that some of McGonigal’s previous projects have involved "World Without Oil"–a simulation intended to brainstorm and thus potentially avert a future post-peak oil crisis–McGonigal also foresees that over the next decade, game designers will become the "architects of extreme-scale collaboration" In particular, it’s an important part of future games design to create "diverse massively-multiplayer communities [that] tackle real-world, open-ended problems." It’d be nice to think we could game our way to a solution to the world’s issues, wouldn’t it?
Here are McGonigal’s five challenges:
- If you could: Make one person measurably happier. Who would it be, and what game would you make for them?
- If you could change: What one person does every day, or how one group thinks about one thing. What would you change, an how would your game do it?
- If your game could get: 100 people to do one thing online. What would it be, and what would it add up to?
- If you could make a game by: Embedding one micro-controlled board or one sensor in one physical object. What would it be, and how would you play with it?
- If you could make a game that: Connects two unlikely communities to do one extraordinary thing together. Who would it be, and what would they collaborate on?
It’s inspirational stuff, a pleasant intellectual contrast to the mindless hard-fragging first-person-shooter games we’re all familiar with. And its hard to argue with. The challenges are typified in McGonigal’s online global game "Top Secret Dance Off," which challenges participants to complete dance "quests" and e-mail in digital footage of themselves in action. The game relies on the principle that "dancing together = happy … humiliated together = even happier." Check out the compiled video of some entrants for the recent Dance Quest 3: Dance In a Crosswalk. It’ll make you smile.
Original article: Fast Company.
Mozilla, graphics group seek to build 3D Web
Wish you could play Crysis in your Web browser? Two influential organizations are banding together to try to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the Web, a move that eventually could improve online games and other Web applications.
The Web is gradually becoming a better foundation for applications with splashy, sophisticated interfaces, but 3D graphics on the Web remain primitive. Now, though, Mozilla, the group behind the Firefox browser, and Khronos, the consortium that oversees the widely used OpenGL graphics interface technology, are trying to jointly create a standard for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web.
In response to a Mozilla proposal, Khronos established an Accelerated 3D on Web working group to create a royalty-free specification. The goal is to produce a first public version within 12 months, Khronos said in an announcement at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.
Underpinning the proposal is a trend toward significant speed improvements in JavaScript, the programming language used to write many Web-based applications. The proposal involves a mechanism to let JavaScript tap into the OpenGL standard to produce the accelerated graphics.
"Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every Web browser vendor means that we’re going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open Web technologies," said Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard in a blog post Tuesday. "3D is a huge part of that story and we’re happy to bring our proposal to the table."
Mozilla plans to release the technology first as an extension to its browser sometime after Firefox 3.5 is released.
See the full article at Webware.
Nanotech Invention May Be Golden Bullet for Controlling Drug Addiction
Scientists at the University of Buffalo have found a new use for nanotechnology–as an extremely precise way of delivering chemicals to the right part of the brain to combat drug addiction. And, pleasingly, the science really does fit the "golden bullet" label as these nanoparticles are literally made of gold.
Medical researchers have known for a while that a particular brain protein, DARRP-32, is a key element in the chemistry of drug addiction. It’s a "trigger" for a host of reactions in the brain that creates craving, and if it’s "silenced," then the urge to re-take a drug should diminish. The trick is getting to the protein to quash its influence, which requires conventional therapies to cross the blood-brain barrier, something that’s proven difficult.
Enter the gold nanoparticles. They’re actually nanorods, and in the Buffalo technique, they’re coated with short-interfering RNA (siRNA) molecules which switch off the DARRP-32 protein. The combination is apparently 40% efficient at reaching the target sites in the brain, which is much higher than previously possible, and it’s apparently the first time siRNA molecules have been combined with gold nanoparticles. The gold is particularly suited to the task due to its high biocompatibility and the fact that the rods have a larger surface area than nanospheres, thus allowing more RNA to stick to the exterior (in the image, the brain cells show as blue, and gold nanoparticles within them as orange spots.)
Read the full article at Fast Company.
