The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘cinema’

There are a few “holy grail” purchases for home theater. One is the format-agnostic HD playback device plus DVR that will record HDTV as seamlessly as a TiVo but doesn’t require a cable card (NOTE: This does not exist), another is a strong, over-the-counter bottle of painkillers to help get through this upcoming season of Heroes and Lost (NOTE: This also does not exist.). But the piece de résistance of every AV nerd’s arsenal is a 1080p projector

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Review: Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 6500UB

I’ve just hooked up the LifeCam Cinema to my desktop, and thought an SD comparison was in order. In a stroke of genius, I attached the LifeCam to the top of my Mac so it and my iSight were pretty much aligned — though not so much that it’s seamless. I did a little video so you can compare color, fidelity, and all that.

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Comparing Microsoft’s 720p LifeCam Cinema to an iSight

I’ve just hooked up the LifeCam Cinema to my desktop, and thought an SD comparison was in order. In a stroke of genius, I attached the LifeCam to the top of my Mac so it and my iSight were pretty much aligned — though not so much that it’s seamless

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Comparing Microsoft’s 720p LifeCam Cinema to an iSight

Apple left out a large customer base when it released the Mini DisplayPort only 24-inch Cinema Display . Suddenly computers with only a DVI output couldn’t play nicely with Apple’s top monitor.

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Atlona steps up to the plate, produces DVI to Mini DisplayPort converter

It’s been a bad day for the Internet’s old guard. This morning we reported that Yahoo was pulling the plug on Geocities. Now we’ve learned that Lycos Cinema, one of the social media projects created by the once-massively popular web portal, is closing its doors. Granted, Lycos has been under new ownership for years and has been trying to get a foothold in markets unrelated to the web portal/search engine that made its famous, but it’s still a name many of us associate with the late 90’s, when it was among the most trafficked sites in the world.

Lycos Cinema launched over two years ago, with the promise of letting friends watch videos from different computers at the same time using ’simulstream’ technology, which was supposed to mimic the social experience of watching a movie in a movie theatre or over at a friend’s house. The site got a big upgrade last May, when it launched a new chat client and a revamped interface.

Unfortunately, it looks like Lycos Cinema never got over its biggest obstacle: a lack of content. We wrote last year that the site hadn’t signed any of the major studios, and by the looks of the current library this never changed. The only studio listed is ‘National Lampoon’, and I can honestly say that I haven’t heard of 90% of the movies featured on the site’s homepage. That may have flown a few years ago, but with sites like Hulu and TV.com offering recent movies and TV shows, there just wasn’t much of a reason to head to Lycos Cinema.

According to the notice at the top of the site, Lycos Cinema will close on April 29th.

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Well, it finally happened.  Apple just delivered its 1 Billionth application download from the App Store, which currently features over 25,000 apps (35,000 by one estimate) built by thousands of developers. The significance of the milestone (besides just the 1 billion mark) is that it’s taken only nine months from when the App Store launched on iTunes to hit 1 billion paid and unpaid downloads.

Last summer, Apple sold one million 3G iPhones worldwide across 21 countries in the first 3 days on sale. During that same time, iPhone users made 10 million app downloads from the then newly launched iTunes App Store.

The count was at 300 million in early December, and the App Store hit 500 million downloads by January 16th.  It took Apple six months to reach the first 500 million downloads.  It would take Apple only three months to get another 500 billion downloads.  By March, 2009, it was at 800 million.  We started keeping track via Apple’s billion-app countdown at around 928,077,779. Apple also offered us a fleeting glimpse of the most popular apps ever, something the company only did once before.

Apple apparently already had a hunch of when the billion mark was going to be passed, because the billionth app celebration page was already ready to go.

Apple predicted the time when the billionth app would be downloaded: 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23. That didn’t happen.

The number of different apps available has also been growing  steadily.  In November, the app store had 10,000 apps, and grew to 15,000 by Apple’s quarterly earnings call in January. Within a month, the app store added 5,000 more apps, bringing the total available apps up to 20,000. By March, the app store has over 25,000 apps.  Now, according to an estimate by App Store analytics firm Mobclix, there are 35.550 apps worldwide.

Some lucky iPhone user who downloaded an app in the past two weeks will win a $10,000 iTunes gift card, MacBook Pro, Time Capsule, and iPod touch. We also hosted our own contest to see who could guess when the billionth app would be downloaded and we will release the results soon.

Here’s a current list of the top apps, free and paid, downloaded, courtesy of Mobclix. The numbers next to the global stats indicate how many countries had that app ranked as #1.:

Top 5 free (Global):
1: Heat Pad - Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface (17)
2: Skype (9)
3: Ferrari GT Evolution: Lite Version (6)
4: Racing Live (4)
5: Yahoo! Messenger (4)

Top 5 paid (Global):
1: Camera Zoom (12)
2: Flight Control (11)
3: Playman Track & Field (3)
4: Wild West Pinball (2)
5: Airport Mania: First Flight (2)

Top 5 free (US):
1: Catcha Mouse
2: iDare
3: F-MyLife
4: Heat Pad - Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface
5: Dictionary.com

Top 5 paid (US):
1: Flight Control
2: StickWars - Siege
3: Pocket God
4: iHunt 3D
5: ParkingLot

[photo: flickr/thetruthabout]

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