New technology designed to thwart DVD theft makes discs unplayable until they’re activated at the cash register.
A chip smaller than the head of a pin is placed onto a DVD along with a thin coating that blocks a DVD player from reading critical information on the disc. At the register, the chip is activated and sends an electrical pulse through the coating, turning it clear and making the disc playable.
The radio frequency identification chip is made by NXP Semiconductors, based in the Netherlands, and the Radio Frequency Activation technology comes from Kestrel Wireless Inc., based in Emeryville, Calif.
The two companies are talking to Hollywood studios and expect to announce deals this summer, Kestrel Wireless Chief Executive Paul Atkinson said.
The companies said their technology also can be used to protect electric shavers, ink jet cartridges, flash memory drives and even flat-screen TV sets by preventing some critical element from functioning unless activated.
Retail theft of entertainment products, including video games, accounts for as much as $400 million in annual losses, according to the Entertainment Merchants Association.
Gadget counts people who look at ads:
A Canadian professor has developed technology that allows advertisers to count the number of people who look at their billboards and screens.
Roel Vertegaal’s Xuuk eyebox2 is a $999 portable device with a camera that monitors eye movements and automatically detects when you are looking at it from up to about 35 feet away. Until now, Vertegaal says, such eye-trackers have been ineffective beyond 2 feet, required people to remain stationary and cost more than $25,000.
“It can track interest for your advertisers so you can actually have a business model where you sell the ad by the eyeball,” said Vertegaal, a professor at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.
The eyebox2 comes as ads increasingly appear on plasma display panels in shopping malls, restaurants and other public places. Although Internet ads can be measured by the number of hits on a Web site, it is much harder to assess the ads on plasma screens.
Virtual game ties in real pawnshops:
Online games give players roles such as warriors, space explorers and wizards. Now, there’s an exciting new profession: pawnbroker.
“Entropia Universe,” a science-fiction game whose currency is convertible to real-world U.S. dollars at a fixed 10-1 ratio, said this week that five pawnshops will make real loans to people who turn in virtual items such as laser rifles and bionic implant chips.
The pawnshop licenses sold for a total of $404,000, according to the Swedish company behind the game, MindArk PE AB, and the holders may be able to extend their services to function like banks, potentially boosting the game’s economic vitality and sophistication.
“It’s just like the construction business in the real world – none of that would happen without banks,” said Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs, who with a business partner paid $90,000 for a license to create a “Gamer’s Bank.”
Jacobs, who already runs a hunting and entertainment resort that pulls in as much as $20,000 a month in revenue, said players have a lot of money tied up in hunting and mining equipment, and the pawnshops will free up that capital.
Cellular service helps find heart recipient:
Police located a 10-year-old boy awaiting a heart transplant by asking his mother’s cellular provider to locate her cell phone.
John Paul May, of Harrisville , Pa., had the successful surgery at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh on Saturday night, but came dangerously close to being passed over for the donor heart until police tracked down the boy and his mother at a jazz festival.
The hospital called state police Saturday afternoon because officials couldn’t reach the boy’s parents to let them know a donor heart had been found. When police couldn’t find the boy or reach him by phone, they contacted Sprint Nextel Corp. to get the coordinates of his mother’s cell phone.
“The only time you can use it is life or death, or to track someone wanted in a homicide,” state police Cpl. James Green said. Otherwise, police must get a warrant from a judge.
Using the coordinates, state police tracked the phone to a Slippery Rock University building. Police stopped the jazz concert that was happening and announced they were looking for the boy and his mother, Sue.
The crowd of some 500 jumped to their feet and gave the boy a standing ovation as he left, said Steve Hawk, a music professor who conducted the concert.
From Herald news services
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