The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Sep 23 : FujiFilm announces Real 3D camera
- Sep 30 : Clearspring acquires AddThis
- Okt 1 : Apple threatens to close down iTunes
- Okt 2 : Nokia unveils iPhone competitor
- YouTube redesigns upload, shows hot spots
Sep 23 : FujiFilm announces Real 3D camera
At Photokina 2008 in Germany, Fujifilm announced the development of a completely new, real image system: FinePix Real 3D. It features a 3D camera, a 3D photo frame to show the 3D pictures and a 3D printer to print them out. The camera is equiped with 2 lenses that are 6-7 centimeters apart from eachother, about the same length between most people's eyes. Fujitsu's 'Real Photo Processor 3-D' chip will then process both images and push them onto the LCD screen, which shows the image back in ... 3D (without the need for the red and blue glasses)! The way the 3D LCD screen works is that it sends out the light from the two images in two different directions going back and forth at a frame rate of 60 frames per second. Although previous attempts have been made to create real 3D camera's, they all were of low quality and high price, something Fujifilm wants to solve with it's Real 3D camera. And by the time this camera is released next year, the company is promising to be able to shoot HD video on it as well.
Sep 30 : Clearspring acquires AddThis
Widget distributor Clearspring has acquired the 'biggest little thing on the net', as Clearspring's CEO describes AddThis. AddThis is an immensely popular service for sharing bookmarks on different platforms like delicious, digg, MySpace and Facebook and appears on hundreds of thousands of websites including ABC, MySpace, Time.com and the G.E.E.R.T. blog 
. Clearspring on the other hand connects advertisers (people having content) and publishers (people having space on the web) by enabling advertisers to wrap their content into easily publishable blocks (widgets). It's still unsure how the two services eventually will be merged, but together they will deliver 20 billion page views per month, which makes Clearspring the most widely used set of content-sharing services
on the Web.
Okt 1 : Apple threatens to close down iTunes
If you want to buy a song from Apple's iTunes store, you pay 99 cents. Out of that 99 cents, Apple keeps 29 and the music label gets 70. Out of those 70 cents, the label pays the artist 9.1 cents.
Recently music publishers asked the Copyright Royalty Board to increase the royalties paid to
publishers and songwriters for the sale of digital downloads from 9
cents to 15 cents per song. But that was not to the likings of Apple, who threatened to close down iTunes all together if the deal came through. As Apple iTunes vice president Eddy Cue stated : "Apple has repeatedly made it clear
that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not
continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer
possible to do so profitably.". A couple of days later, the Copyright Royalty board decided to not sustain the rate increase. I wonder if Apple will still be able to keep on pulling this kind of tricks a year from now, now Google supports the Amazon MP3 store and Nokia starts pushing its own digital music store on the new XpressMusic phone?
Okt 2 : Nokia unveils iPhone competitor
After Google's announcement of the G1 phone 2 weeks ago, Apple's iPhone dominance is now under attack from another direction: the Nokia camp. On October 2, Nokia reveiled it's first touchscreen phone, baptised 'XpressMusic' but also know as the 'Nokia Tube'. As the name already indicates, the phone is mainly focussed around music features (graphic equalizer, 8Gb of memory, built-in surround sound stereo speakers, ...) and it will support 'Comes With Music', a Nokia service that offers one year of unlimited access to the company's music store catalog currently holding 2 million tracks. This will put the XpressMusic 'Comes With Music' in direct competition with Apple's iPod and iTunes and the G1 with its connection to the Amazon MP3 service. To fully take on the iPhone it however still misses an application platform (which Google did provide with the launch of G1) and Symbian, the operating system now fully owned by Nokia, lately gets also some criticism when compared to Windows Mobile or Android.
The XpressMusic phone is expected to be made available worldwide in the next couple of months.
YouTube redesigns upload, shows hot spots
On September 28, YouTube announced that they (finally) redesigned the online upload functionality to catch up with other video services like vimeo. Apart from the ability to enter meta-data (title, description, tags, etc.) while the upload is processing and simultaneous uploading without a plugin, it now allows you to upload video clips up to 1GB instead of the previous 100MB limit (here's the tester link to the new uploader). The 10 minutes per video limit however still stands...
Almost together with the upload redesign, YouTube also released a cool new feature in 'YouTube Insight', the platform's analytics tool. The new feature was named 'Hot Spot' and in a clear graph shows second-by-second how interesting (or not 
) every part of your clip is perceived by the viewers. See my post on the topic for more info.
Finally, in another attempt to monetize the platform, Google is (again) experimenting with post-roll advertising (advertising that is shown at the end of a clip) on selected videos by official partners. Strange thing is that when they launched in-video advertising back in August 2007, Google claimed post- and pre-roll advertising didn't do well with 75% of their test audience. Either way, with the new Hot Spot feature they now have the ideal tool to test the effectiveness .
