Edgelings.com

The Apple iPad2 — Thin, Sleek and Fast

edgelings — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:39:13 +0000

The Apple iPad2 is everything you want in a smart tablet supermodel -- and expect from Apple. It is imperially slim, elegant and surprisingly fast. The display may be a little small compared to the its newest competitors -- and it still doesn't support Flash -- but boy is it pretty. Better yet, almost unique for Steve Jobs & Co., it is the SAME price as its predecessor. See you and raise you, Android. . .

‘The Photograph,’ Now with an Additional Photograph

edgelings — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:44:33 +0000

Michael Malone of ABC and Edgelings contributed a beautifully written and uncharacteristically low-tech article to the PJM homepage on Sunday called “The Photograph.” It’s a very Jean Shepherd/Wonder Years-style look back at his childhood in the early 1960s, spurred by the Christmastime flash of seeing a photo of himself from that period, shot by a pro-photographer, which Michael had assumed was long-lost.

Based on the number of comments it received asking for more, he’s just appended it with an additional image. Click over to see large versions of both of these photos. — Ed Driscoll

Angel

edgelings — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 06:09:09 +0000

One of the world's most remarkable women died recently. You didn't read about it.

Dancing on Air

edgelings — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 19:47:19 +0000

Yesterday, Apple introduced its new MacBook Air laptop computer (yes, Apple still makes computers). It is thinner and lighter than ever -- and seems to answer the complaints against its predecessor by offering much more battery life. So, it looks like another winner for Apple, the latest in an amazing string of successful new products that has made the Cupertino company (at least according to its market cap) the second most valuable company on the planet. But can you still be cool when you are no longer the maverick but the Colossus? No longer David, but Goliath? A commentary and Qik video by NBC-KNTV technology reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

Magic Bullet Returns 64-bit Adobe CS5 Users to the Suite Life

edgelings — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 19:37:20 +0000

Magic Bullet Suite 10 returns the versatile video applet's functionality to Adobe's 64-bit programs, including the CS5 versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop.

Takin’ It to the Stream

edgelings — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 07:42:32 +0000

Can an Old School Rock and Roll band find its way in a world of iPads and Android phones? That's what the Doobie Brothers and Cisco set out to discover this week with a live-streamed concert performed in a small studio at Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose. Story and video by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

Mad Mechanical Men

Scott Budman — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 07:23:11 +0000

They don't pound down to the booze in their offices anymore, smoke cigarettes and wear skinny ties, or even put the moves on secretaries . . .in fact, the new generation of advertising men aren't even men at all. In fact, they aren't even human. Meet the new Halo:Reach robot. It's about to put the touch on you. Story and Qik video by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

No, Dude, You’re Not Getting a Dell

Scott Budman — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:15:45 +0000

Is the Dell Streak the Apple iPad killer? Not even close. Commentary and video by NBC-KNTV technology reporter and regular Edgelings contributor, Scott Budman.

Silicon Valley’s New ‘It’ Company

edgelings — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:49:10 +0000

SILICON VALLEY’S NEW ‘IT’ COMPANY by Scott Budman

The current “it” startup in the tech world is — perhaps fittingly — in an office that looks like an outlet for Silicon Valley’s “it” tech giant.

Flipboard’s headquarters (at least for now) is a stark white office in Palo Alto, Calif. filled with long desks, holding up so many MacBooks and iPads, it looks like a small Apple store.

It’s not selling anything yet, but what it gives away is red hot. Flipboard makes the app for your iPad that turns the web news you want into a digital newspaper, that you can touch. It turns your Facebook page and Twitter feed into magazine of sorts, too. If you haven’t tried that last one yet, it really makes those 140-character links you flip through look like the skeleton of what the Twitter stream should be.

You can check out what Flipboard looks like here: www.qik.com/budman.

I sat down with Flipboard co-founder Mike McCue, to talk about his latest venture. McCue is one of those guys who, though quiet, has been part of enough Silicon Valley success stories to earn E.F. Hutton-like respect around here.

After leaving Netscape, his ventures included TellMe, which he sold to Microsoft. Now, he’s got the world’s hottest download, what many are calling the iPad’s first “killer” app. He says he got the idea for Flipboard while visiting an airport newsstand. Which makes sense, in a sort of “past-meets-present” kind of way. The newsstand is likely going away, along with many of the items it sells. But paging through Flipboard makes you understand why so many tech-watchers predicted that the iPad could actually bring the publishing industry back to life. We already know that digital downloads now rule the Amazon world. Now, reading newspaper and magazines feel hip again. And they look great.

The Top Five Financial Pornographers

edgelings — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:34:57 +0000

The Dow at 35,000? At 1,000? How can so any financial 'experts', all apparently looking at the same data, come up with such wildly divergent predictions for the future? Maybe the best answer is that these predictions have very little to do with empirical conclusions, and a whole lot to do with elbowing your way into the media limelight by exciting the fear and greed of your audience. A commentary by Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes Magazine.

An American Life

edgelings — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:32:47 +0000

A remarkable generation -- the 'Greatest' Generation -- is rapidly departing from amongst us. We will not see their likes again. In Silicon Valley, as elsewhere, we honor and memorialize the most famous figures of that generation -- here, most often, the great industrialists, scientists and entrepreneurs who led the digital revolution. But there were thousands of others, usually uncelebrated, who created post-War America and built places like Silicon Valley. And even a surburban housewife, with sufficient ambition and will, could leave her mark on the history of the region. Here's the story of one of them, memorialized by her son, Edgelings editor-in-chief, Michael S. Malone.

Desktop Videomakers Should Walk Through Digimation’s Model Bank

edgelings — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 19:35:49 +0000

While 3d computer graphics have been around since at least the 1970s, the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, and especially the rise of Internet video in recent years created a whole new “prosumer” interest in them. But for me, 3d models, virtual sets, and other digital effects are more interesting when they’re used to tell a story. And every once in a while, it’s nice to go on location — if only virtually!

The Leap of Leadership

edgelings — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 07:25:02 +0000

You've read all of the articles and seen the books -- and perhaps even take the courses -- but do you understand any more now than before about what it takes to become a real leader? Indeed, can true leadership even be taught? No, says Edgelings editor-in-chief, what must happen before anything else is a leap of faith; a commitment not unlike religious belief. The good news is that ANYONE can do it.

Teens in Tech

edgelings — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:03:17 +0000

This summer may be the worst in living memory for teenagers looking for summer jobs. So, why not take a cue from their unemployed moms and dads? Be an entrepreneur and start your own company! Sure the risk of failure is high -- but no higher these days than working for someone else. Here's the story of two teenagers who did just that; and appropriately enough, have built a company helping other kids find jobs. Story and video by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

Transistioning to Adobe CS5 May Mean Hanging onto CS4 for a While

edgelings — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:12:50 +0000

As Videomaker’s recent review highlights, the new CS5 versions of Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects are pretty spiffy, with their new features, plugins and faster rendering times, provided your PC is up to the task. But as I found out the hard way, if you’re an veteran user of either or both programs, you might not want to hang on to their earlier iterations for a little while longer.

The CS5 versions of these programs are built for a 64-bit computing architecture, which can dramatically speed render times, and allow for additional tracks of video and effects, as reviewer Brian Peterson highlighted in his Videomaker article:

For most of us, the most exciting news is Premiere Pro’s significant performance increase. At the heart of this speed improvement is the new 64-bit architecture, memory addressing, CPU optimization and the new Adobe Mercury Playback Engine that leverages the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of a compatible nVidia graphics card. This means that for processor intensive operations, such as using highly encoded video formats, you’ll get real-time performance even after stacking on layer after layer, each with effects and color correction.

For a quick speed test, we compared the frame rates of an identical project on the same computer in CS5 with GPU acceleration enabled and in CS4. We stacked six layers of various HD video formats that included two HDV, a DLSR and graphics MOV, AVI and, just for fun, an F4V. Each had at least three different effects, and four had additional motion and scaling. After hesitating for 10 seconds before starting, the playback in CS4 slowly climbed to 2.5 FPS. After a two second delay, the playback in CS5 was real-time without any dropped frames.

* * *

Like Premiere Pro, the big news for After Effects is the improved playback and rendering performance. 64-bit memory addressing allows you to work with much larger files and create longer previews if you have the RAM. For instance, our test machine has 32GB so instead of 5.5-seconds of full resolution HD video with 4GB, we were able to produce a 111-second RAM preview. Although this did take several minutes to render, it is at least possible to preview your timeline within After Effects.

But the tradeoff is that many older aftermarket plugins designed for their earlier 32-bit iterations won’t work in the new CS5 versions. And for those of us who’ve built up a bunch of plugins over the years, it’s tough waiting for old favorites to be reissued in 64-bit versions.

Starting Up In The iPad Garage

edgelings — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:29:10 +0000

There's been a lot of talk in the last year about entrepreneurship being on the wane in Silicon Valley. Perhaps that's true for the big money start-ups . . . but in the world of low-cost applications for Apple iPhones and the new iPads, there's an entrepreneural landrush going on. Our intrepid correspondent, NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman, took a closer look at one of the hottest of these new companies -- and found some striking similarities to some of the great Valley companies of the past.

Industrial Light & Masking Tape

edgelings — Thu, 20 May 2010 08:45:50 +0000

Over at Ed Driscoll.com, I take a look at how to use the chromakey plug-in found in most video editing software programs to produce driving shots for your next YouTube production, without taking your car out of park — or leaving your driveway:

Adobe CS5: The Return of Serious Magic’s Ultra Keyer (Sort of)

edgelings — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:44:31 +0000

Hiding in plain sight within Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS5 is the latest iteration of many a veteran video maker’s old friend: “Ultra,” a chromakey program developed in mid-naughts by Serious Magic, a start-up that was acquired in the fall of 2006 by Adobe.

For its time, Ultra was pretty bleeding edge stuff for a chromakey program, as Serious Magic’s demo reel from around 2006 demonstrated:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

It was also extremely easy for any beginner to get a decent key out of, as this video, the second clip I shot for my Silicon Graffiti video blog back in early 2008 highlights. Compared to the skills I’ve acquired after having used Ultra for about two and a half years, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing back then, but managed to at least get myself keyed into some of the virtual sets that were available as accessory packages for the Ultra program:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Ultra was bundled with Adobe CS3, but because it was Windows-only, and somewhat outside the Premiere/After Effects/Photoshop workflow, it was dropped from Adobe’s CS4 package, and its virtual sets deleted from Adobe’s catalog. (This happened in the fall of 2008. About five minutes after Videomaker magazine published an article of mine on Ultra and virtual sets in general, naturally.)

Today, in the world of 64-bit computing, and 1280×720 and even 1920×1080 format videos increasingly becoming the norm on YouTube and on Internet video sites such as PJTV, the original version of Ultra is looking a little long in the tooth. But fortunately a slightly stripped down version of Ultra is incorporated in the latest, CS5 version of Adobe’s Premiere Pro.

The new version works great with footage shot in a variety of formats, including the MTS file format used by Adobe’s OnLocation package, which allows any Firewire-equipped camcorder to shoot video straight to the computer’s hard drive. And it produces the same tight key that Ultra produces, with a variety of source material, and is equally forgiving of funky lighting and less than perfect green screen backdrops. (And somewhat more flexible, as it uses the crop and garbage matte tools built into Premiere Pro, thus allowing, via keyframe editing for traveling mattes and the like, something that Ultra didn’t allow.)

As I said though, this is a somewhat stripped-down version of Ultra, whose controls have slightly different labels than the original version. Those who’ve assembled all four packages of Ultra’s virtual sets (follow the links for those sets’ original demo reels) will have no problem importing their still images into a timeline in Premiere, and then keying onto them. You’ll likely end up with several layers, including the background of the set, the chromakeyed footage, a set’s foreground elements if any, and B-roll on the monitor. But this footage can then be imported into a new timeline as nested clips and easily edited together as if it were a single layer.

But the original Ultra also typically had really slick (again for, three or four years ago) moving camera shots for most of their proprietary virtual sets. These shots were designed for show opening and closings, and typically trucked the camera through the virtual set, with all of the elements, including the person being keyed in, moving in three dimensions.

If you still have a working version of Ultra, you might want to keep it handy to generate these shots. Otherwise, those who missed the original Ultra will be happy to see its baby brother back in the Adobe lineup. In any case, Adobe Premiere’s Pro finally gains a high quality chromakey applet, something that it was sorely missing.

(Written by Ed Driscoll.)

What’s Happened to Silicon Valley? (Part 5)

edgelings — Sat, 08 May 2010 20:12:45 +0000

NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman finishes his unprecedented five-part series of the current, troubled state of Silicon Valley on an optimistic note. He visits a new tech start-up that, despite any number of obstacles, decided to move TO Silicon Valley to take advantage of its unique entrepreneurial culture. Commentary and video.

What’s Happened to Silicon Valley? (Part 4)

edgelings — Fri, 07 May 2010 23:11:08 +0000

Engineers around the world used to dream about coming to Silicon Valley to be part of the tech revolution -- and maybe get rich and famous in the process. But that dream has soured. Not only is the Valley no longer the economic magnet it used to be, but other regions -- and other nations -- have been working hard to build their own domestic high tech industries. Once, the Valley was the biggest of port of entry in the U.S. for the best and brightest of the rest of the world; not it's become a 'brain drain' for talent. Can the flow once again be reversed? Four in a series on the state of Silicon Valley by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

What’s Happened to Silicon Valley? (Part 3)

edgelings — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:56:48 +0000

How can Silicon Valley have record unemployment and STILL have some of the highest home prices in the country? It's one of the great conundrums. On the other hand, what no one argues about is that the Valley has never before seen such a collapse in commercial real estate. You can almost see from one end of the Valley to another . . .through the windows of empty office buildings. It'd be a great time to start a new company and take advantage of one of those vacant office buildings -- if it was possible to start a new company these days. When will Silicon Valley, the heart of America's electronics industry, start filling those buildings again with talented entrepreneurs? NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman goes in search of answers.

What’s Happened to Silicon Valley? (Part 2)

edgelings — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:51:33 +0000

The heart of Silicon Valley, and the engine of its economic prosperity, has always been its start-up companies. Replacing the aging local companies with new ideas, new products and new leaders, entrepreneurial start-ups have kept Silicon Valley perpetually young. But government regulations and other factors have nearly broken the venture capital industry over the last decade -- and that in turn has made start-up capital increasingly rare. The few start-ups that have survived the last few years have had to lean down and toughen up. What then happens to a Silicon Valley without its new generations of new companies? Part two of a five part series -- commentary and video -- by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

What’s Happened to Silicon Valley? (Part 1)

edgelings — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:30:07 +0000

The big tech companies are doing well these days, but a quick tour through Silicon Valley shows a record number of empty buildings and offices. Real estate prices are slowing beginning to climb again, but the Valley still has the highest unemployment rate since the years after WWII. And if, after a decade of doldrums, local firms are finally planning again to 'go public', the number of new entrepreneurial start-ups -- a defining feature of the Valley -- is shockingly low. In a week long series, Scott Budman, Silicon Valley reporter for NBC-KNTV and a regular Edgelings contributor, looks at what's gone wrong in Silicon Valley -- and what it means for the rest of the U.S. economy -- and what may, at last, be going right.

The Apple Empire Strikes Back

edgelings — Sat, 01 May 2010 17:58:52 +0000

How did it come to pass that local Silicon Valley police, backed by a state task force, broke into a blogger's house and took his computer equipment -- a move they would never try with a 'real' newspaper -- merely because an Apple employee screwed up and left the prototype of the new iPhone in a bar? Well, therein lies a tale of a legal system that has decided to forgo the First Amendment in order to coddle those (traditional media, large corporations) in power. Commentary by Edgelings editor-in-chief Michael S. Malone.

An iPad Road Test

edgelings — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 07:34:08 +0000

Okay, the Apple iPad, the biggest product phenom of 2010, has been on the market now for a few weeks. We've already heard from the Apple kool-aid drinkers that it is the greatest invention in the history of the world, or at least since the iPhone. And we already know that the iPad is going to sell in the millions of units. but is it actually any GOOD? Well, to find out, we turned to our intrepid Silicon Valley journalist, NBC-KNTV reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman, for the straight skinny. Here's his report.

Adobe CS5 Rolls Out Today

edgelings — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:09:30 +0000

The latest version of Adobe’s flagship software suite rolls out today. As AP notes, “Bad timing hurt sales of the previous version, Creative Suite 4, which went on sale in the fall of 2008 just as the financial crisis hit. As a result, many customers — which range from small design shops and Web developers to large ad agencies — held back on buying upgrades.”

So will online designers, along with photo and video editors switch to CS5? AP adds:

Overall, the latest update of Creative Suite aims to make it easier for its users to include interactive elements in their designs. A new tool called Flash Catalyst, for example, lets traditional designers create interactive Web content without knowing how to code software. It uses drop-down menus that can turn boxes on a screen into buttons, for instance.

“It can take traditional print designers and help them get into interactivity,” said Chris Kitchener, a senior product manager at Adobe.

This is also the first time Creative Suite includes services from Omniture, a company Adobe bought last fall for $1.8 billion. Omniture’s technology helps companies measure the ways people interact with Web sites, ads and online applications.

Creative Suite 5 includes an upgrade of the Photoshop software that makes it easier to detect the borders of images within a photograph, among other new features. This could come in handy when trying to delete or move an image of a person from a photograph. Typically, detecting just where a person’s hair strands end and the background begins is a painstaking process.

CS5 will cost between $1,299 and $2,599. It will ship in the next 30 days and will be available in “major languages,” which in the past meant English, French, German and Japanese, by June 4, the end of Adobe’s fiscal second quarter.

Plug-in manufacturers such as video-oriented Red Giant are already gearing up to support the new platform.

(Written by Ed Driscoll.)

The iPad Finds a Home

edgelings — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:49:01 +0000

All of the attention about the new Apple iPad centers around its potential as a consumer product. But what if the iPad's real destiny is as a professional productivity tool? A first glimpse (including a Qik video) at just such a possible future by NBC-KNTV technology reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

A Qik Look at the New World of Smartphone Video

edgelings — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 07:33:16 +0000

We may have been off writing books the last few weeks, but high technology never sleeps. Luckily, our intreprid NBC tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman is always on the case. This week, he's looking at the next generation of 4G smartphones . . . and an increasingly popular application -- it's called Qik, and it's been described as a 'video Twitter' -- that brings shared video to these devices.

20 Years of Photoshop

edgelings — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:37:25 +0000

The world -- at least the world we think we're seeing --has never been the same since a young graduate student developed a software program called Display. That was twenty years ago, and that program, now called Adobe Photoshop is the mainstay of adverising agencies, graphic designers and troublemakers everywhere. Indeed, after two decades of Photoshop, it's hard to know any more what is real and what is not. Report by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor Scott Budman.

Streaming Success at YouTube

edgelings — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:23:45 +0000

The jobs numbers are still as bad in Silicon Valley as everywhere else in the U.S. And yet, high tech entrepreneurship can't be denied . . .and some companies have begun to bust out of the general malaise. And there is no hotter company hiring in the Valley these days -- and no more popular employer -- than Google's on-line video site, YouTube. Report and video by NBC-KNTV tech reporter and regular Edgelings contributor, Scott Budman.