GoPro: How Tiny Camera Reinvented Epic Adrenaline Junkie Moments

Even if you’ve never heard of GoPro, you’ve definitely seen the footage it captures of extreme snowboarding shreds, death-defying leaps and epic wipeouts from impossible angles.

“It continues to blow our minds that GoPro is what it is today,” said company founder Nick Woodman.

For Woodman, the journey from guppy to Goliath in the camera world began on a surfboard in 2002.

“The original goal for GoPro was to produce a camera that the average surfer could use to capture themselves and their friends while they were surfing.”

And now, eight years after rolling out their first finicky prototype — – a wrist-mounted 28 mm film camera – Woodman took “Nightline” on a four-day research and development road trip to the shores of Nicaragua, a surfer’s paradise. They are beta testing their newest camera, the HD Hero3, which was released last month. Some of Woodman’s old surfing buddies are now the company’s top officers.

GoPro claims to be the world’s best-selling small camera maker, with over three million GoPro HD cameras sold since 2009. It is success that could arguably be credited to the hordes of bruised and unpaid stuntmen out there, trying to live up to the product’s name: Hero.

The vast majority of GoPro videos out there – with over 190 million views on the GroPro’s Youtube page — are user generated.

“YouTube has helped make GoPro what it is today, Facebook also,” Woodman said. “Our customers going out and capturing interesting footage with it is really what’s driving GoPro’s growth. It’s a virally grown brand in the hands of our customers and it’s awesome.”

Since 2009, the company has grown from seven employees to nearly 300, and signed some the country’s most famous athletes, including Olympic gold medalist snowboarder Shawn White and world surfing champion Kelly Slater. But the camera, which costs up to $400, has become much more than a gizmo for the self-admiring surfer.

“GoPro makes it possible for people to have professional-quality footage of their life during their life’s most meaningful moments,” Woodman said.

The versatile camera has even become part of the essential kit of journalists covering a wide range of breaking news events, from oil spills to catfish hunts to lightning strikes. It is also good for experimenting with one of GoPro’s latest innovations, the follow-cam waist belt, in the Nicaraguan surf.

Watch ABC’s Matt Gutman’s full story on “Nightline” tonight at 11:35 p.m. ET

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Steve Jobs’ yacht unveiled in front of family, named ‘Venus’

Several years before his death in 2011, Steve Jobs began working with Phillippe Starck on the design of a luxury yacht. On Sunday, it was unveiled at a special ceremony in the Netherlands.

The yacht that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs helped to design has been unveiled in the Netherlands just over a year after his death.

The building of the yacht was something of a pet project for Jobs and had been in the works for over five years.

Designed with the help of the acclaimed French product designer Philippe Starck and built by Dutch custom yacht builder Feadship, the 80-meter-long vessel is made with lightweight aluminum and features 3-meter-high clear glass windows as well as a large number of 27-inch iMacs on the deck. Sounds like a floating Apple store, some might say. Indeed, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs published shortly after his death in October 2011, the former Apple CEO called on the skills of the chief engineer responsible for the Apple stores, asking him to design special glass that would be able to provide structural support for the vessel.

Named Venus after the Roman goddess of love, the unusual looking boat – whose design will certainly not be to everyone’s taste – was reportedly unveiled at a special ceremony in Aalsmeer in the Netherlands on Sunday. Jobs’ widow Laurene and children Reed, Erin and Eve were at the launch.

Speaking to the BBC about the vessel, Starck said, “Steve and I shared the same idea about the elegance of the minimal, the elegance of work well done,” while  at the same time admitting that it does “look strange for a boat.”

In Isaacson’s biography, the Apple co-founder said that despite being seriously ill with pancreatic cancer, he couldn’t suddenly stop working on the design of the boat.

“I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat,” he told Isaacson, “But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”

It’s not clear when Venus will make its maiden voyage, or indeed what plans the Jobs family has for the vessel, though we guess at some point it’ll be transported to a location close to their California home.

[Top image and video: onemorething.nl]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Does the RIAA even want Pandora’s golden eggs?

The same services that have helped the recording industry stamp out piracy are on the brink of starvation and death… because of the recording industry.

Streaming music services are dying.

I know, I know: By almost any metric you use, the streaming music business is actually booming. Let’s just look at the two biggest examples. Over 150 million people have signed up to hear tunes through Pandora, while another 33 million folks sing in the shower with the help of Spotify. Spotify alone sucked down over a quarter of a billion dollars — that’s billion with a “B — in revenue in 2011. Pandora’s revenues topped $100 million last quarter alone.

That’s a ton of ears and even more moolah, and those numbers should only increase as more and more people move to using mobile devices with limited storage space and free-roaming Internet abilities.

Even still, the streaming music services are dying. That’s because the one metric that matters most just so happens to be the one metric that both companies fail miserably at: actually making money. Despite those millions of customers and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, you see, neither Pandora nor Spotify have yet to make a single dollar’s worth of profit. And it’s not their fault.

The streaming music services are dying, choked slowly into oblivion by the overwhelming greed of the music industry.

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

By almost any metric you use, the RIAA and the rest of the American music industry should be swooning over the meteoric rise in streaming music popularity. The streaming music revenue model monetizes listeners who used to download albums off of BitTorrent and LimeWire, converting their once-illegal habits into actual income through the royalties paid by the services themselves. In a nutshell, streaming music services turn nothing into something for the RIAA and co.

Study after study has shown that having free or low-cost legal music options stamps out piracy much more efficiently than dragging illicit downloaders into court ever did. Spotify found raging success in the Scandinavian countries, for example, and those countries have seen music piracy rates drop between 25 and 50 percent since the service launched. The number of pirates continues to dwindle as time goes on.

Given that the U.S. boasts more music pirates than any other country in the world, you’d think the music industry would want to nurture the blossoming streaming music industry into maturity. And it does: In a 2012 industry report (PDF), the IFPI — International Recording Industry Association — calls streaming music “a fast-expanding business model” and notes one big potential upside. “In the à-la-carte environment, an album or track is downloaded once and paid for. In the streaming environment, a track or album may be listened to hundreds of times, each triggering a payment to rights holders.”

Streaming music is a cow that will never run out of milk. Unless, of course, the cow itself winds up dead. The music industry’s greed could very well end up doing that.

Why aren’t streaming music services making money?

It’s simple: they pay too much money out in royalties.

Pandora differs from most streaming music services in that it’s more accurately called an Internet radio station: It plays whatever music it wants, then gives the artist a royalty payment in line with what’s mandated by a government statutory license, which also imposes limits on on-demand listening and the number of times a song can be played in a set time period. The license fee works out to the greater of $0.02 per listener per hour or 25 percent of the company’s revenues.

It’s that “whichever’s greater” part that’s killing Pandora. That line forces Pandora to pay out over half its revenue in royalties, a completely unsustainable long-term business model.

Because of that, the company is lobbying hard for Congress to pass the Internet Radio Fairness Act, a bill that would allow Internet radio royalty rates to be set by a panel of judges who adjust royalties based on their commercial value, similar to what’s done for traditional cable and satellite radio. The move could drop Pandora’s royalties down to 8 to 16 percent of total revenues, a much more sustainable amount. Our Geoff Duncan already tackled the complex subject in-depth.

Conversely, the music industry backs a competing bill called the Interim FIRST ACT (PDF) that would force traditional broadcasters to pay the same high royalty rate as Internet radio stations.

Spotify and the other on-demand music streaming services handle things a bit differently. They’ve negotiated individual licensing deals with the music labels that have the services paying agreed-upon rates for streaming music. The exact amounts haven’t been disclosed, but they’re definitely steep: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has said that 70 percent of revenues go “back into the industry,” but a recent leak of the company’s 2011 financials suggest royalty-related costs could consume a whopping 97 percent of the company’s revenue.

Streaming music: Shining brightly, but destined to fade?

No company can survive those kinds of content costs. Even more incredulously, several artists have complained that services like Spotify still don’t pay them enough, although TechDirt’s Mike Masnick — a noted intellectual property journalist — says that when a royalty collection agency studied the numbers, it found that Spotify pays a much higher royalty rate per-listen than iTunes or traditional radio.

Some analysts have suggested that running more ads would reduce the royalty burden and increase revenues for streaming music services, but as anyone who’s ever listened to the free version of Spotify can tell you, the service runs an abundance of ads — and it’s still losing money hand over fist.

It’s a complicated subject, to be sure, and it’s similar to the struggles other content providers are facing in an Internet-connected world where most digital content inevitably moves towards no cost for the end user. But here’s the rub: The music industry has already been there. Piracy ran rampant in the previous decade in the form of file-sharing, and that specter still looms large over the U.S. music scene.

Low-cost streaming music services offer artists salvation, having already proven that they can turn today’s bleak piracy-filled landscape into a profitable revenue stream for the future. But if the music industry can’t check its greed and hash out a royalty scheme that works for artists and streaming services alike, it could very well snuff out the golden egg-laying goose for good. If the two brightest streaming music stars can’t sustain, none of the services can.

But hey, look on the bright side! If Spotify and Pandora go down, there’s always BitTorrent.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Is reading dying or flourishing in the Internet age?

Technophobes may have hailed the death of the book with the advent of TV decades ago, but studies show we’re bigger readers now than ever.

A friend of mine scoffed last week when I noted that I actually budget reading time into my workday. He started with the tried and true “Must be nice to be self-employed.”

I explained that, as a professional writer, reading is just as important as sitting at the keyboard. It provides the raw materials that my brain turns into finished works.

“But why do you have to schedule reading time? You spend 8 hours a day at a computer, like the rest of us. Most of that is reading.”

We then got into a discussion on whether humans read more now than they did 50 years ago, before the majority of us were stuck in front of a screen all day.

I don’t think that anyone can doubt that as a society we read more now than we have at any time in our history, on a per-word basis. Half the people of the civilized world have what amounts to the world’s grandest library in their pocket.

Of course, it’s not just a library.

Estimate how many words you read per day on Twitter alone. If you are a user of any volume at all, that number is at least in the hundreds. Then add on Facebook. Maybe you are an avid user of RSS. Perhaps you are a fan of Fark or Reddit, in which case your per-day word count explodes astronomically. And we won’t even mention texting. A lot of people read the equivalent of a magazine’s worth of text every day.

But why is that not enough for me?

First, because an article from Fark entitled “Pet monkey put on house arrest” is not what anyone would consider high art.

Second, we now have two forms of reading in this brave new world. One which requires a longer attention span, and one for online pursuits. For my purposes, there needs to be a strict ratio of deeper reading to online reading. If nothing else, I need the exercise for my attention span. Sometimes these columns take a long time to write, and if I allow myself too much online billiards, the deadline will pass.

An article in Scientific American by Coco Ballantyne from 2008 – before the widespread adoption of e-readers and tablets – attempted to describe the differences in reading online from reading books.

Citing a study from the Journal of Research in Reading, the article states that the simple acts that we take for granted, like scrolling and changeable dimensions of text, are affecting our neural reasoning – perhaps on an evolutionary level. The simple act of having to scroll down to read more text, or (god forbid) having to click a link to get to the next page of a piece is warping our attention spans and decreasing our tolerance for longer works.

You could be tempted into thinking that this is a harbinger for the death of longer reading. As English teachers have been saying since the advent of the Internet, the novel may not exist for your grandchildren’s generation, and with its demise goes humanity’s most efficient method of storytelling.

But a funny thing is happening while all of this technology is killing longer textual works: more people are reading books and novels than ever before.

For the past 50 years or so, during their various polling, Gallup has systematically asked their respondents if they happen to be reading any books or novels at the present time. In their most recent release of the results of that questions in 2005, nearly half (47 percent) of the people questioned said “yes.”

In 1949, before television allegedly sucked out our parents’ brains and all people had to do for entertainment was read and listen to an hour of radio at night, that number was 21 percent.

I would venture to guess that that percentage has only grown further, now that people can carry thousands of books with them wherever they go and can read them in the little snippets that our brains are now accustomed to while they commute to work or wait at the doctor’s office. I’m even hopeful that the majority of that percentage wouldn’t be made up of people reading Fifty Shades of Grey.

Humans are an adaptable species, which is how we’ve come to rule this planet in the first place (although all bets are off if an asteroid comes around). I have simply adapted my reading habits to my current lifestyle. Apparently other people are doing the same.

Our technology is not destroying our old traditions of transacting information; it is making them accessible to more and more people. One of our priorities moving forward should be ensuring that everyone has that access.

[Image credit: Book & Tablet - Denphumi/Shutterstock; Book & Laptop - Wrangler/Shutterstock]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Neil Armstrong to Have Private Funeral Friday

Neil Armstrong suiting up for Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. NASA.

Neil Armstrong, remembered after his death Saturday as a quiet man, is to have a quiet funeral on Friday near his Cincinnati home, NASA confirmed today. The service is to be private, though Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, who called Armstrong “a good friend and adviser,” will be there for a eulogy. While there have been discussions of a national memorial service, nothing has been confirmed yet.

The White House issued a proclamation this afternoon that flags would fly at half-staff on Friday. The Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Armstrong’s birth place of Wapakoneta, Ohio, plans a tribute Wednesday night, and Purdue University in Indiana, where he studied engineering, announced a late-afternoon memorial today.  Streaming video can be found on the Purdue website.

So far everything is in keeping with his family’s description of him — “a reluctant American hero who always believed he was just doing his job.”

Armstrong — who commanded the world’s attention in 1969 when he became the first human being to walk on the moon — died Saturday of complications following heart surgery.  His family would not say where he died, though he had spent the last several decades in his native Ohio.

There were tributes from around the world — from President Obama and Mitt Romney, from fellow astronauts and celebrities — but his family asked people to dispense with words.

Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty,” they said in their statement announcing his death, “and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com