Researchers at Cornell University are hard at work on a project that sounds odd at first, but is in fact a perfectly natural extension of existing 3D and computing technology. They’re making an engine for producing the sounds of colliding objects by simulating the materials of the objects themselves in a virtual space, and then calculating the forces and vibrations that would be produced. Academically it’s a challenging proposition, but it has plenty of practical applications as well.

The simulation of noise propagation perhaps would be most easily applied in 3D games, which despite having nearly photorealistic models, textures, and lighting, still rely on a limited cache of pre-recorded sounds to play when, say, a table tips over. By simulating every object on the table and tracking the physical effects of collision with the floor, other objects, and the resulting reverberations, a more realistic and accurate sound can be created on the fly — or at least that’s the theory.

Right now the researchers acknowledge two obstacles. First, the physical world needs to be simplified greatly in some cases in order to provide a workable amount of data. A ball hitting the floor is one thing, with only a few factors to calculate, but what about a stack of dishes rattling against each other on a table that has been jostled? The number of contact points must be reduced so thousands or millions of different interactions don’t have to be tracked separately. At the same time, they must have enough to produce a realistic sound. It’s a balancing act governed by the amount and type of objects and the computing power they have at hand.

And it seems that not everything can be generated completely from scratch just yet. Their demo at SIGGRAPH has the stack of dishes mentioned above, but apparently soundtracking flames it isn’t so easy. The low-frequency part they’ve got, but for the rest had to base their models based on recorded fire sounds and then “paint” them onto the low end. That said, most common sounds are predictable in the same way physical interactions are predictable (being that they are themselves sums of physical reactions), and it’s just a matter of getting the tools to do so.

Parallel processing hardware (like graphics cards or many-core CPUs) will be necessary to make these calculations on in real time, though: simulating the fire noise takes hours just for a short clip. But the very idea is compelling to anyone who’s heard the same “glass breaking” or “ricochet” noises in games or even movies, where the catalog of sounds is limited.

Right now it’s still in the labs, but this is definitely the kind of thing that gets turned into a product and sold. A company like Nvidia or Havok would love to get their hands on this. Unfortunately there’s no video, but if one becomes available after it’s shown at SIGGRAPH, we’ll put it here.

Update: it turns out that there are videos, just not of the presentation:

Nikon publishes a program called Camera Control Pro, a software program intended to help the studio photographer by allowing them to tether their camera to a computer. The problem is, Camera Control Pro doesn’t support some of the latest cameras, and it has a $150 price tag. This inspired Nikontrol 3K, a free program that does basically the same thing, but for free.

Nikontrol 3K was written using the software development kit, and while it only works on the PC, it allows a photographer to remotely control their camera from their computer. You can also preview the last photographs taken, save images from your camera and choose to keep or store the images on your memory care, send files to a FTP server, and it even supports time-lapse shooting.

Of course, this is free and enthusiast written software, so your mileage may vary as far as it’s functionality. Be sure to read all of the support documentation before installing the program.

[via Nikon Rumors]

The Pew Internet organization put out results of a survey on how many people pay for digital content online. The study found that 65 percent of people online have paid to download some form of digital content or for a subscription to a digital media service. The survey excluded physical goods bought online and was focussed only on digital content such as music, software, news, and other online or electronic publications.

For those who do spend money online on digital media, most spend between $1 and $10 a month, with 68 percent spending less than $30 a month. (You can see the distribution of amount spend in the chart above). The two kinds of digital goods people are most willing to pay for by far are music and software. One third of respondents (33 percent) say they have paid for either digital music or software online. And 21 percent have paid for mobile apps. So if you combine mobile apps and other forms of software, that is the largest single category even accounting for overlap in the numbers. Paying for digital games comes in fourth at 19 percent.

What about digital newspapers or magazines behind paywalls or for sale for tablets like the iPad? A respectable 18 percent of respondents say they have paid for news or other reports online. That even beats out the 16 percent who have paid for movies or TV shows. Media companies will love that stat. And ebooks? Only 10 percent have bothered to pay for those.

Here is the full breakdown:

• 33% of internet users have paid for digital music online
• 33% have paid for software
• 21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
• 19% have paid for digital games
• 18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
• 16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows
• 15% have paid for ringtones
• 12% have paid for digital photos
• 11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
• 10% have paid for e-books
• 7% have paid for podcasts
• 5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games
• 5% have paid for “cheats or codes” to help them in video games
• 5% have paid to access particular websites such as online dating sites or services
• 2% have paid for adult content

This is no secret, but developers will have to play by Apple’s rules if they want their Apps to live on the Mac App Store in the future. Apple notes that developers should only submit finished products to the store, and that demos or trials of any kind should instead be made available on developers’ Web sites. This may also apply to “lite” editions of Apps.

Or, in Apple’s own words:

Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore. The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your app.

While that does signify a change in the way Apple’s App Store works—clearly the App Store is filled with all sorts of “lite” iPhone software—it may make a little bit of sense when you consider the Mac App Store is dealing with desktop software. You may be willing to put up with a trial version of an iPhone App because, well, it’s “just” an iPhone App, but perhaps Apple doesn’t want the perception to be out there that Mac OS X software is nothing but half-finished demoware and whatnot?

But it does speak to what I alluded to some weeks ago (now featured in a Yale class!), that an Apple-controlled Mac App Store will very much change people’s perception of what Mac OS X software can, and should, be.

I leave it up to you if that’s a or bad thing.

It may also mean that the Mac App Store will be less about free-wheeling exploration of software and more about the simplified delivery of software.

It’s sort of the opposite of what you find on so many e-book stores these days. Many books have at least a chapter available for free to see whether you like it or not.

But, this is Apple’s store, and it can do what it likes. Such is the life of a closed platform.

In the third quarter of this year, 662 companies raised just $5.4 billion. It’s not uncommon to see a muted third quarter in the venture business due to summer vacations, but this was the smallest amount raised in a summer quarter since at least 2005. Unless the fourth quarter outperforms, the industry will likely wind up in the same range as 2009′s total of $23 billion raised by US companies, which is down by about 30% from recent years. That’s not surprising given the dearth of IPOs and the fact that venture firm fundraising is down too.

Still, there were few interesting surprises in the numbers.

Researchers saw a shift in investor attention away from consumer products and services and towards business and financial services. Almost as many business and financial services companies have raised money in first nine months of 2010 as did in all of 2009. Consumer goods and services, on the other hand, saw one of its weakest quarters since the recovery. Although year-over-year the numbers for consumer products and services held up, there was a sharp drop in dollars on a quarter-over-quarter basis, down from $985 million in investments in the second quarter to $621 million this quarter. The reason could be as simple as timing. Several big deals may have just closed in the second quarter and not the third. But it could indicate a frustration with rising valuations and the general frothy consumer Web mood.

The number of cleantech and healthcare deals was pretty steady but, in terms of dollars, it’s a different story. Healthcare has been weak this year, but energy and utilities have surged. Year-to-date dollars going into energy companies are up a huge 47% to nearly $2 billion.

There was also a 26% uptick in the amount of money going to software companies– a cool $1 billion this quarter. “Software” is an inherently broad category, but it has historically been the venture industry’s largest and most consistently profitable one.

It’s a ho-hum quarter overall, but there are seeds of cleantech delivering on its promise, a new generation of enterprise companies and a meaningful disruption of the finance-industry. At a minimum, these numbers show that more entrepreneurs and VCs want there to be.

On a can’t-we-all-just-get-along note, the survey found that there was an increase in venture capital firms and angels doing deals together so far, year-to-date, although to be fair it’s a small $282 million in co-investment out of some $18 billion raised so far in 2010. Returns may be a different matter for this generation of funds, but in terms of money flowing out, this is still a VC’s business.

Is there really any doubt the Mac App Store will be anything other than a huge hit when it debuts in 90 days? Seven billion downloads on the current App Store would suggest that Apple knows what it’s doing (and that people really love to slingshot cartoon birds into buildings). And the benefits of the App Store are clear: it’s an easy-to-use, one-stop source of safe, tested software. Usually. Maybe not all of that software is worth your time—how many fart Apps do you really need?—but the platform itself is sound, and Apple is keen to make sure it stays that way. But the platform is closed. Only with Apple’s approval (not to mention its 30 percent cut of the action) can your App find a home on the App Store.

But is that scenario ideal when it comes to desktop operating systems?

When Apple rolls out the Mac App Store in three months’ time, it will have created a new “class” of Mac software: Apple-approved and App Store-certified. All of a sudden software that isn’t from the Mac App Store looks a little less… official. New Mac users—and there’s sure to be plenty given Apple’s year-on-year growth—will be trained from Day One to look to the Mac App Store for software. What happens to software developers who, for whatever reason, don’t want to be a part of the Mac App Store? Why would a new Mac user visit third-party sites like MacUpdate or VersionTracker to find software when they know they can always pull up the Mac App Store to find Apple-approved, App Store-certified software?

You can also be sure that Apple will leverage the Mac App Store to sell its own software, further boosting the status of all software found on the Mac App Store. During yesterday’s demonstration, Apple showed how easy it is to buy, download, and install Pages, the word processor component of its iWork suite, using the Mac App Store. (Not showed, of course, is just how easy it is to download and install software using the decade old apt-get system, but let’s leave that alone for the moment. Steam also says hi, perhaps gritting its teeth a little bit.) What Mac user is going to go out of his or her way to find and download software when they can just as easily pop up the Mac App Store—safe, tested, secure—and browse away from there?

And perhaps bordering on the conspiratorial, why would you want Apple granting or denying its seal of approval on the software you run on your computer? I thought these were called personal computers? Who’s to say, somewhere down the line, that Apple doesn’t decide that the Mac App Store is the only place where new software can be acquired? For your safety, dear Mac user, we’ve eliminated the ability to launch .app bundles not delivered by the Mac App Store. We hope you understand that this is being done with your best interests in mind. Thank you for choosing Apple.

Do I expect that to ever happen? Obviously not—that’s ridiculous, even for Apple—but let’s not pretend that’s not exactly what happens on the iPhone and iPad. How many times has Apple warned us not to jailbreak our iDevices, citing security and stability concerns, not once mentioning that jailbreaking is the only way to install “unapproved” software?

My concern, I suppose, is that an over-reliance on, and an over-veneration of, the Mac App Store could lead to an unnecessary, if not dangerous, homogenization of Mac software.

Again, to expect that the Mac App Store won’t be anything other than a smashing success is pure folly, but let’s at least be cognizant of just how dramatic a shift the Store may well represent.

/me ducks

Have you launched VLC today? If so then you’ll already know that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. The biggest feature in this version is the addition of GPU decoding for Windows (Vista and 7 only) and Linux users. That is, you can use that fancy GPU of yours to help decode that 1080p MKV you’ve got there, leaving your CPU with enough room to breathe, or whatever. Fair warning: if you’re on Windows, hope you’ve got an nVidia GPU…

That’s right: on Windows, the new feature only supports nVidia GPUs. The release notes say this is because ATI‘s Windows drivers don’t work properly.

NB: so far, on Windows, VideoLAN is quite sad to be forced to recommend nVidia GPU, until ATI fixes their drivers on Windows, and until VLC developer get access to some Intel hardware supporting GPU decoding.

You’ll also notice that clever little dig at Intel. How you can expect some rubbish Intel GPU to decode video, I don’t know, but there you go.

Mac users, of course, are totally left out in the cold vis-à-vis GPU-assisted decoding.

Well first, the bad news; your iPad is gone. Not a whole lot you can do about that, except maybe hope you had the MobileMe stuff installed, and that’s a whole different subject. What you do know is when your precious was stolen. How do you know? You have a little application called PadLock installed. PadLock is the latest from software developer Kitchen Budapest, and tells you whenever your iPod, iPhone, or iPad is unplugged from your Mac. If at any time, these devices are unplugged from your computer, the PadLock software makes a loud noise, alerting you to the potential theft. How do you stop the alarm? Well, you can either plug your portable device back into your computer, or simply go into the software and disable the alarm. Luckily, this software is free, and open source. At any rate, you can download this program directly from Kitchen Budapest, and start feeling that warm safe sensation of absolutely no security provided by their software.

For those who aren’t familiar with Lightroom, it’s a tool under the Photoshop umbrella intended for photographers who want robust RAW image editing as well as a powerful organizational tool for keeping track of thousands of shots. If it sounds a bit like Aperture to you, it is — but both products are relatively new (compared with oldsters like Photoshop and Office), so it’d be just as fair to say that Aperture sounds a bit like Lightroom. I happen to use Aperture, but I found the latest update slightly disappointing, and may just switch to LR permanently.

But what about the update? Well, if you’re in the beta, you’re probably familiar with some of these features. But there’s new stuff for you guys, too. So let’s see here. Apologies if it seems like I’m reading off the press release, it’s hard to remember all this stuff from the demos.

Perspective correction: Here’s a tool most of us would just run into Photoshop to do, but which is handy to have at your fingertips. It’s basically just adjusting the angle you’re shooting from, within reason of course. Handy for situations where you really need something to be parallel with the edges of the photo, but you couldn’t get at the right angle when you were shooting.

Improved noise reduction and sharpening: If you’ve tweaked your photos at all, you’ve probably seen what can happen when sharpening gets out of hand. The new LR sharpening algorithms try to avoid that weird effect that happens when you push the sharpness too far. Noise reduction is more intelligent as well, and tries to avoid losing color and detail when reducing noise, which can be quite difficult when the details are the same size as the grain.

Streamlined importing: tagging, renaming, and organizing rolls is now apparently easier, and it certainly looked like it when they showed off creating an import preset.

Streamlined publishing: the Flickr integration they showed off was really quite impressive. You can manage all kinds of stuff, from ratings and comments to privacy settings, via the in-app plugin. There are other plugins as well, and their API is available for people who want to make new ones. Drag-and-drop publishing and easy sharing are something they are having to push real hard for, since Aperture 3 made sharing one of its top priorities.

Tethered capture: seemed to work fine in the demo. Definitely nice to have, and you can adjust settings on the fly to be applied to shots coming in.

Video support: still pretty rudimentary right now, but it’s good to at least be able to keep your videos in the same containers as your shots.

Easy slideshows: if you like making slideshows, it’s easier now. Sync the length to a piece of music, add intros and outros, export to video… what you’d expect. Aperture had the jump on them in this, I believe, but they’ve leveled the playing field again.

New adjustment preset system: If you create a “look,” or “development setting,” or whatever you want to call it, that you like, it’s super easy to drop it onto another photo or to apply it to multiple photos at once. Mass rotation is also handy if you choose not to include orientation data in the EXIF like me. Another thing they’ve gotten even with Aperture with — though from what I saw, I think I like LR’s style better. Their curves system was also way more convenient. The ability to grab any luminance level straight from the preview and just drag it up and down is nice.

For more information, or to buy ($299 or $99 upgrade from LR2), head on over to Adobe’s site.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10356980&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Auto Smiley – Computer vision smiley generator from Theo Watson on Vimeo.

I predict it’ll take exactly seven minutes before someone makes Auto Frowney to automatically detect and insert sad clown faces.

Via Make.

There are various output presets based on your hardware. All the different Mac laptop and desktop models are available, along with various “universal” settings for other brands of speakers and headphones. I found that this plug-in only really shines when you’re using either the built-in speakers, or low-quality peripherals. When listening on my Sony MDR-7506s, I didn’t notice any change from the enhancer.

I could see this being a piece of pre-installed software, but I would be hard pressed to drop $30 on it. Especially for only one license. They’ve got a free trial available, so you guys can go listen for yourself. They’ve even got endorsements from at least three members of Boston. Or you could encode your audio into a decent file format. Yeah, do that.

Witness this opinion piece in the LA Times by David M. Cummings entitled “Haven’t found that software glitch, Toyota? Keep trying“. Mr. Cummings worked on the Mars Pathfinder project for NASA, so he has some credibility to his name when it comes to software design and product testing. But his opinion piece seems to completely miss the point of the PR nightmare that Toyota is dealing with.

Mr. Cummings says “I’m still skeptical when I hear an engineer declare a complex software system to be bug-free based on laboratory testing.” I admit I haven’t been following the Toyota situation very closely, but I’d be floored if anyone at Toyota has gone on record to say that the millions of lines of embedded software used in Toyota vehicles is “bug free”. I’d be surprised if any professional software developer anywhere would have the gall to claim any code bug free. Code is complex. The systems on which the code runs are complex. The number of variables affecting the execution of that code are even more complex.

As Mr. Cummins observes at the beginning of his rant, “Toyota’s chief engineer testified to Congress that the company has done extensive testing on its cars’ electronics and believes they are not the cause of the sudden acceleration.” To claim that the software is not the cause of the sudden acceleration is not the same thing as claiming that the software is completely free of bugs!

What really sticks in my craw about Mr. Cummins complaint, though, is that he doesn’t appear to appreciate the audience that Toyota is addressing. Sure, some of the people following this situation are engineers, and they may well be interested in the details of the testing methodologies, or specifics of lab results; but most people are average consumers with no interest whatsoever in the science of this issue. They just want to know that the problem has been identified and fixed.

When I provide technical support to people, I don’t go into the specifics of memory registers, or heap and stack overflows, or any of the other things that happen to cause problems. I tell people that something went wrong in very simple terms. They trust me to know what I’m doing, else they wouldn’t have asked me to help them to begin with. They don’t want to get into the nitty gritty, else they’d pursue a job in technology on their own. I think Mr. Cummins needs to remember that not every Toyota owner, and certainly not every member of the U.S. Congress, is an engineer, or has an engineer’s mentality.

Mr. Cummins final remarks are very sound, though: “this should serve as a wake-up call to all industries that increasingly rely on software for safety.” I agree whole-heartedly. The world is only going to continue to get more complex. We need to build safety and reliability testing into every facet of product design, and not trust the tool chains we use to build software.

Right around the time the world’s financial markets started to collapse, back in 2008, RealNetworks, the folks behind RealPlayer, released RealDVD. It was a short-lived piece of software that made making DVD movie backups fairly painless—too painless for Hollywood, which immediately took RealNetworks to court, claiming all sorts of copyright infringement hokum. That’s all in the past now, for RealNetworks has settled with the six “major” Hollywood studios to the sum of $4.5 million. Ouch.

The deal sees RealNetworks, yes, cough up $4.5 million for “costs and fees in connection with the litigation.” Some deal: you bring someone else to court, then make them pay all your bills. RealNetworks will also stop supporting RealDVD, and is in the process of refunding the purchase price to the 2,700 people who bought the thing.

The company’s statement is sad:

We are pleased to put this litigation behind us. This is another step toward fulfilling our commitment to simplify our company and focus on our core businesses. Until this dispute, Real had always enjoyed a productive working relationship with Hollywood. With this litigation resolved, I hope that in the future we can find mutually beneficial ways to use Real technology to bring Hollywood’s great work to consumers.

“Core business”? Hasn’t Flash (and hopefully HTML5) made RealVideo irrelevant?

I liked RealDVD, if only because it demonstrated quite clearly that Hollywood has no intention of letting you use the items you buy for your own ends. DVDs copied using RealDVD could only be played on that computer where it was ripped. It’s not like I could have borrowed Doug’s copy of Movie, then shared the resulting file with the other guys or anything.

The point is, RealDVD is now dead as disco, but RealNetworks may have earned itself a little bit of geek cred in trying to stand up to big, bad Hollywood.

Check your calendar, friends, for the first time in a long time I was just wowed by a tech story. Google says it’s working on smartphone software that would automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue. So, if you’re talking to your Venezuelan pen pal, and he says, “No me gusta el fútbol americano,” you can react in horror as you try to explain to him the importance of a game where more time is spent setting up plays than actually executing them is the greatest sport in the world. Porqueria.

If all goes according to plan, the software could be ready in just a “couple” of years, which is to say Google has no idea when it’ll be ready for public consumption.

You’ll recall that Google already has a fairly robust translation software suite, and it’s totally free. It’s not entirely machine translation, though, which is generally rubbish, since people can help contribute with certain words and phrases that might not mean what the literal definition suggests.

Like, I just used the word “rubbish” to mean that machine translation is not always very accurate, not that it’s refuse.

All part of Google’s plan to ensure that humanity is fully dependent on its services, I suppose.

Here’s a tip: learn Spanish or French or Italian in high school, and you can pretty easily pick up any other romance language with not too much effort. Spanish and Italian and Portuguese are pretty much “mods,” to use a PC game word, of Latin, so it all works out.

Another year, another release of iWork. This time, though, with full iPadsupport. Yes, Apple showed off iWork 2010 at its big press conference today, and the updates are about what you’d expect from the application suite: incremental and filled with one or two things that make you say, “Wow, neat.” That being the multi-touch support.

The three applications that make up iWork—Numbers, Pages, and Keynote—will be sold separately for $10 a pop on the iTunes Store. So, if you only want Keynote, if for no other reason than to makes a slide-show presentation using your fingers, then you’ll only be out $10.

Of the three, Pages seems to benefit the least from the multi-touch. Plain old text entry does just fine with a keyboard.

And yes, all three applications will be available for non-iPad Macs.

We’re guessing the new iWork will be released alongside the iPad, but hard info is a little hard to come by right now. Let the dust settle for a little bit.

As far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you’ll soon be able to buy a dedicated D-Link box to more easily use it on your TV. But Boxee isn’t the only XBMC-based media center that’s worth your time. It’s not even the first XBMC fork to go out and make a name for itself. Plex, which is exclusive to Mac OS X, was Boxee before Boxee was cool. I recently talked to the lead developer, Elan Feingold, to get a better understand of what Plex is, what it does, and where it’s going. Needless to say, if you’re running Mac OS X, you ought to give it a shot. It’s good.

Plex is a media center that’s based on XBMC, which began its life as Xbox Media Player, a media center that ran on hacked Microsoft Xboxes. Xbox Media Player was first released in 2002, and was far and away the most feature-rich media center of its time. As the project matured—and the project was in no way endorsed or supposed by Microsoft—it became XBMC, of which Plex (and Boxee and MediaPortal and Voddler, to name a few forks) is based upon.

In other words, every time you praise Boxee (or Plex, or any other XBMC-derived media center), keep in mind how it all started: a hobbyist project designed to play and organize videos, music, and photos on hacked Xboxes. (You may even want to go further back and give credit to the developers of mplayer and FFmpeg, the two core, open source “engines” that powered Xbox Media Player from Day One.) Let’s give credit where credit is due, is all.

With that, here’s my conversation with Elan. Hopefully it’s illuminating.

CrunchGear: What is Plex? How would you describe it to a total computer novice? Did you ever use XBMC/XBMP for the Xbox1?

Elan Feingold: Plex is a media center, which is to say it’s a program which gives you a “ten foot interface” for your media. You sit on the couch, drink beer, and view your videos, photos, and play music. It came out of the desire to get the XBMC code running on a more powerful machine that could handle higher resolution media, and the perfect platform seemed to be the Mac (especially with the Mini’s awesome form factor). I used XBMC for a few years on an old XBox (which is now sitting in my garage gathering mold) and loved it.

CG: When did development begin? How many people are on the development team? What’s your relationship with the XBMC guys?

Elan: The XBMC code was first downloaded to attempt to build it on the Mac in December 2007. My wife was out of town and I was bored, basically. Currently we have about five developers working on the different aspects of Plex. When I posted a progress report with screenshots about progress on the Mac port, I was contacted by the XBMC team, and brought on their team. Over the next few months, I made some early releases of the port, which I’d called “OSXBMC”. However, it became clear pretty early on that I had different goals and vision for the project than the XBMC team did, so we ended up forking the code to become Plex not too long afterwards.

CG: Oh man, I remember OSXBMC! I remember the day it became Plex, too.

Elan: Do you remember all the shit I got about the name?

CG: Meh, people are haters.

Elan: You can’t please everyone.

CG: Right.

Elan: That [the OSXBMC time period] was a pretty hard time emotionally for me, just because of all the work i was doing on the code and all the strife and vitriol.

CG: Wow, OK. Now I have to ask do you (or the team) make any money off Plex? (How many mugs did you sell?) Or is this a labor-of-love sort of thing?

Elan: We have a donate link [the top-right hand corner] that people have been very generous with, but it’s not much more than is needed to cover servers, services, equipment, etc. I think we’ve sold a dozen or so mugs! So for now this has been very much a labor of love for us all.

CG: Gotcha. Now is Plex *just* a labor of love, or do you guys one day hope to make a few dollars for yourselves?

Elan: Don’t get me wrong, we’d all love to be doing this full-time and getting paid for it.

CG: You guys seem to have more of an “indie” feel to you than Boxee does.

Elan: I have been known to sport trendy facial hair.

CG: What a phenomenal response.

Elan: But that’s exactly the word we like to use to describe ourselves, “indie.”

CG: OK, well one of the big Boxee features is that you can have all sorts of apps on it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Plex has had that for a little while. In fact, XBMC on the Xbox had little apps you could install, Shoutcast radio, X-Link Kai. Basically, Boxee didn’t invent the idea of media center apps, which I sorta feel is the perception out there…

Elan: Yeah, we’ve had the equivalent feature for over a year now. We have over 130 “apps.” They are easier to write than their Boxee counterparts, or their XBMC counterparts for that matter. We actually had our “app store,” called the Plex Media Server, running before Boxee came out with their “app box” or whatever it’s called.

CG: So how much coding knowhow would it take to develop a Plex app? What are some of the more succesful ones?

Elan: Basically, you need to know a bit of Python, which is very easy to learn. You can write a Plex app in as little as 10-15 lines of code, since we have a really great framework for writing them, which ws developed by James Clarke, one of our main developers. Our most popular ones are Apple Movies Trailers, You Tube, Hulu, Netflix, MTV Music Videos, BBC iPlayer, Vimeo. We’ve had over one million app downloads so far.

CG: Now do you guys run into any issues with those guys (Hulu, Netflix, etc.)? I seem to recall Boxee and Hulu going back and forth for a while.

Elan: Yeah, so Netflix and Hulu have been polar opposites. We’ve had lots of friendly chats with Netflix and have a great relationship with them. We are listed in their app gallery as an official Netflix approved app. With Hulu our relationship has been a bit less congenial. They’ve taken quite a few direct actions to attempt to break our support for their site. Which i really appreciate, as it helped us make our support for those sorts of sites much, much more robust. And I’m flattered, they once named a div in their HTML “PL” which i assume stood for “Plex” (since it was trying to break us).

CG: That’s great. Well, not great, you know what I mean. Do you have those sorts of problems with any other content providers?

Elan: Most other content providers (such as Spotify, lots of other Swedish providers) really like being on our platform. Many have approached us, even offering support. Amusingly it seems to depend on the country. For some reason Swedish content providers really seems to like Plex, and, funny fact, Sweden has the highest per-capita of Plex users in the world.

CG: How does the U.S. rank? Do you have stats like, “We have 100 downloads from Texas, 400 from Paris, etc.”?

Elan: I’d have to find the report, but in the top 10 certainly, no thanks to the content providers!

CG: Do you talk to the Boxee guys at all? Have they tried to hire away one of your devs (or you) with offers of sweet VC money?

Elan: Funny story, I actually cooked dinner for Avner Ronen when he came out to Maui to see me. Besides that, I don’t think he’s approached any of our team. I made him a really spicy green Thai curry, and we had a friendly chat.

CG: Let’s talk Boxee box for a bit. Let’s say Netgear approached you guys about making a Boxee box-like box, would it be something you’d consider?

Elan: We’re not convinced that people want yet another box. That said, we do realize that the Mac Mini at $600 is too expensive to get the number of eyeballs we want.

CG: And the Apple TV is still too underpowered to run it properly right?

Elan: So we’re committed to getting Plex to people more cheaply, just not with a piece of hardware. Yeah, I think the Apple TV is not a viable platform. It’s underpowered and closed.

CG: The Apple TV hasn’t done too well either, compared to other Apple products.

Elan: There’s been some buzz with XBMC lately with their support of a Broadcom chip that can do HD decoding, but you have to take apart your Apple TV and install the chip, which we don’t think many people who don’t live in their parents’ basement are going to do.

CG: Exactly, I was that kid, modding Xboxes, staying up all night trying to figure things like that out.

Elan: Yep, I started off life as an electrical engineer, so I was that kid too.

CG: So what would you say is the ideal Plex setup right now? I used to run a long HDMI cable from my iMac to my TV, then plug the iMac into a cheap 5.1 rig. Obviously not everyone is going to do that…

Elan: If you can afford it, the new Mac Minis are awesome: quiet, small, play HD content perfectly. That plus a surround receiver and you’re set. But yeah, people do use their laptops and iMacs as well. Fifty percent of our users use a Mac Mini, 20 percent use MacBook Pro, 12 percent use MacBook, 11 percent use iMac, 3 percent use Hackintosh. And apparently five of them use an XServe.

CG: That’s great, some guy at a server farm watching movies during the night shift. Now is Plex going for the “average guy” right now, or more the power user?

Elan: Plex is going for the average media-saavy consumer, and we realize that we have quite a bit of work left to make it easier to use. We don’t want to dumb it down as much as, say, Front Row, but right now there are two many sharp edges you can hurt yourself on.

CG: Like a new user interface you mean? Or that Plex is too Swiss Army Knife-y?

Elan: Like an evolved user interface, yes. One of the things that software projects have to keep in mind is that adding a feature adds a non-zero support cost. We don’t think having more features is necessarily better or more compelling, except to a small minority of people.

CG: Yeah, I’m one of those people who’d rather see software do one thing well than do 100 things not so well.

Elan: Precisely, and open source projects are notoriously bad at that.

CG: Yeah they are. So are you developing a new UI now, or is that something you have on your checklist of things to do in the future?

Elan: We’re in the process of evolving the current interface, we’ve spent quite a bit of time mocking things up, even building Flash interfaces to usability-test them.

CG: Oh, before I forget, do you have an official Twitter account? Twitter is all the rage, so I hear.

Elan: @Plexapp

CG: Excellent. So what’s next for Plex, just continued development?

Elan: Well, we’ve been hard at work on the Plex/Nine series.

CG: Will there be anything as dramatic as the Plex Media Server again? That sorta came out of nowhere.

Elan: Yes, you’re going to see a very interesting new Plex feature within the next couple of months.

CG: Excellent. Any hints?

Elan: Also with the Plex/Nine series will come the new Library system for managing your local content. It’s built from the ground up to kick ass.

CG: I was just gonna ask, built by you guys?

Elan: The new library system is built 100% by us, yes. So it should be an exciting year for Plex, I think, between the new Library, evolved user interface, and this surprise new feature.

CG: Very cool. What else do you do besides Plex?

Elan: I’m a freelance software consultant during the day. It’s only at night when I change into my shirt with the giant “P” in front.

CG: When can we expect Plex/Nine?

Elan: That seems to be the question everyone is asking!

CG: Like a rough estimate, or you can say “when it’s ready!”

Elan: I would say that you’ll see pieces emerge over the next few months. We’ll be releasing different bits and pieces over time. We’ll have the stable Plex/Eight series, and then we’ll begin introducing some of the new features into the Plex/Nine releases for people to play with. One of our main focuses has always been stability, which is why there have been five releases so far of the stable Plex/Eight series, with a focus on bug fixes.

CG: Has Apple ever contacted you guys? Maybe just to say, “Hey, cool app, guys.”

Elan: We have never heard from them, although a number of people who work in Apple retail stores have commented, “I recommend Plex to customers!” But nothing from Apple corporate to even acknowledge our existence. That’s fine with us, we’ve always tried to stay on its good side by not releasing Plex for a hacked Apple TV, etc.

CG: Have you given any thought to an iPhone App, like a fancy remote control or something?

Elan: Well, there are a few remotes out there already for the iPhone that support Plex. They seem to work pretty well.

CG: Oh, I don’t have an iPhone so I wasn’t sure.

Elan: You don’t have an iPhone? How can that possibly be?

CG: No sir!

Elan: How can you live? Oh, right, New York City. If you want to actually make phone calls the iPhone doesn’t work too well there I hear.

CG: It really doesn’t. It’s pretty shocking. A piece of junk Verizon phone sounds better. OK then, I have World of Warcraft to play so I’ll let you go. I’m not kidding, either.

Elan: Goodbye, and thanks!

Plex runs on Intel Macs running Leopard or higher. You can follow its development on Twitter, Facebook, or on its blog.

It makes a lot of sense, but it seems to be hard to realize: Using the cell phone for instant voice translation of basic sentences whenever you’re in a foreign country. But Toshiba is one of the companies working on this, and apparently they’re almost ready to offer a decent solution.

Their translation software, in its current iteration, enables cell phones to interpret between English, Chinese and Japanese. Toshiba says that the database, used on their TG01 “smartphone” (pictured above), for example, boasts a database of 30,000 words spoken in each of these languages. Toshiba optimized existing PC software for use in cell phones, which obviously have less processing power.

All that users need to do is to speak into the phone in any of the three languages, let the handset analyze what you said, translate the sentence and say it out loud in the language desired, using the inflections of a native speaker. The solution doesn’t require users to be online, which is ideal for tourists traveling in foreign countries.

Toshiba says they had exactly this target group in mind when developing the software, claiming it’s able to cover around 70% of simple travel-related conversations. The company aims at offering a practical version of the software within this year.

Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

You sorta knew this was going to happen. Microsoft COFEE, a highly secretive forensics tool used by law enforcement, leaked onto the Internet several weeks ago. People far smarter than I got a hold of it, and have created what has been dubbed DECAF, an anti-COFEE set of tools that you can install to block the effects of COFEE.

DECAF, which obviously only runs on Windows, works upon the execution of COFEE. When COFEE is launched, DECAF kicks into high gear, and tries to counteract every one of COFEE’s utilities.

It’s sort of strange, but DECAF isn’t open source. Well, weird only in the spirit of the application; the source isn’t available because the creators don’t want their information reverse engineered.

via The Register

It was one of the most sought after applications on the Internet until it was leaked earlier today. And now that it’s out there—and it is all over the place, easily findable by anyone able to use a search engine—we can all move on with our lives. Yes, Microsoft COFEE, the law enforcement tool that mystified so many of us (including Gizmodo~! and Ars Technica~!), is now available to download. If only there were a “bay” of some sort where, I don’t know, pirates hang out…

I’m not mentioning any names, nor will there be any screenshots, but the resourceful among you will be able to find the application. Not that it’ll do you any good, since this is how Microsoft describes COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor:

With COFEE, law enforcement agencies without on-the-scene computer forensics capabilities can now more easily, reliably, and cost-effectively collect volatile live evidence. An officer with even minimal computer experience can be tutored—in less than 10 minutes—to use a pre-configured COFEE device. This enables the officer to take advantage of the same common digital forensics tools used by experts to gather important volatile evidence, while doing little more than simply inserting a USB device into the computer.

To reiterate: you have absolutely no use for the program. It’s not something like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, an expensive application that you download for the hell of it on the off-chance you need to put Dave Meltzer’s face on Brett Hart’s body as part of a message board thread. No, COFEE is 100 percent useless to you.

Given that, what makes COFEE so mysterious, so special? The sole reason is because it’s never been available before (unless, of course, you’re a law enforcement official). People get a thrill by having something they’re not meant to have, and that effect is magnified online where you have chat rooms and message boards filled with people who get all excited over the idea of having some super-secret piece of software that was never meant to reside on their hard drive.

So that’s that then; Microsoft COFEE is out there. It’s not too big, either, at around 15MB. I’ve kept this post as cryptic as possible primarily to work y’all, and to put over COFEE as the most amazing thing to have never been leaked onto the Internet… until now~!

Flickr

Years ago, when Microsoft started pushing Internet Explorer, it enjoyed favorable adoption rates because, well, it’s already on there, so why not use it? (Law-breaking aside, of course!) That may be what Microsoft is thinking this time around with Office 2010. Redmond will allow OEMs to install Office Starter 2010 on brand new Windows 7 PCs. It will be a pared down version of Office, and one that will be ad-supported. That, of course, has caused the Internet to freak out.

Microsoft is doing this to get people hooked, I guess, on the real version of Office, and to prevent people from using free, online alternatives like Google Docs. The theory is, if you give people a taste of Office, and let them use it without too many restrictions, then why would they go out of their way to find an alternative? Not everyone wants to replace their Windows shell with some fancy thingamajig.

So you’ll have this ad-supported version of Office, which doesn’t include Power Point or Outlook, but then PC vendors will be able to sell license cards at retail, sorta like how you can buy Microsoft Points at Best Buy or Wal-Mart. You buy the card, then use the printed serial number to “upgrade” the starter edition to the Real Deal.

That’s the thing: even though you’re limited in what you can do with the ad-supported version of Office, it’s 100 percent the full software suite residing on your hard drive. That mean cracks will be available within 15 seconds of the first ISO leaking from the manufacturing facilities.

What this means for Microsoft’s online version of Office, which was also supposed to be a sort of introductory version of Office, is totally unknown.

And yet I wonder how many people out there in Radio Land are still running Word 97—Word is the one application that pretty much everyone can use; not everyone needs Outlook or Power Point, you know—because it works just fine?