Techzone360 Week in Review

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In this week’s Techzone360 space, there was an array of news spanning across several topics such as video editing, Facebook privacy, Comcast neutrality, and accusations of Apple tweaking Siri.

Video industry leaders across the globe showcased their solutions at the Streaming Media East show in New York this week, from live streaming to transcoding to broadcasting. From France, and soon to move into the U.S., video editing solutions company, Mixmoov, brought a unique perspective on the right tools needed in the video editing arena.  Customizable for any brand, Mixmoov’s Cloud Video Editing toolbox simplifies the editing process for users. The company has been accruing partnerships with leading video platforms to enable users to edit video without interrupting their workflows.

Hareesh Vazhaparampil, senior product manager for the company, explained Mixmoov’s foresight and action in an interview, “Our strategy has been to be partnered with leading video platforms. Online video platforms provide video solutions to most websites for video purposes. Editing is a value-added service that helps customers. If you have the editing service in the cloud, you don’t have to bring it down, you can simply access it on an end-to-end integrated way.”

In other Techzone360 news this week, Facebook has exploded into the center of consumer culture, serving as the primary form of communication for one in every 13 individuals world-wide. With one million users by the end of 2004, the site now has over 900 million users as of March 2012. With its “like” button and its constantly updating format, no other form of social media can trump Mark Zuckerburg’s brilliant idea, but some beg to differ.

Citing reasons from computer issues to growing privacy concerns, resisters to the world’s largest social networking tool pose a serious threat to the site’s expansion. The largest gap in user-ship is found in the three-quarters of seniors who do not use Facebook, contrasting the 450,000 who are 35 and under who do, or just about half of its active members.

“I prefer to keep my communications personal and targeted…you’re getting a message that’s written for you. Clearly someone took the time to sit down to do it,” said 41 year-old Jake Edelstein, a New York pharmaceutical consultant.

In other Techzone news, the streaming video market has become a contested property and many services are competing for the prize of being the primary provider of video for customers who want to watch whatever they like whenever they like, services like Comcast are finding themselves under fire for potentially playing favorites. While the FCC will be the ultimate force in deciding whether or not Comcast violated net neutrality principles, the end result is the same: Comcast has a clear advantage in the field.

The allegations that Comcast was defying net neutrality principles began around a month ago when Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings noted in a Facebook post that he had Comcast cable Internet service. This by itself meant little, except when he went to watch streaming video on his Xbox 360. He discovered that, while Netflix, HBO Go and Hulu all counted toward his monthly bandwidth cap, Xfinity, did not. Brian Berg also publicized the results of an experiment in traffic prioritization that seemed to weigh heavily in favor of Comcast's own traffic.

Lastly, Nokia recently accused Apple of tweaking Siri, the iPhone 4S’ intelligent voice recognition software, after stating and then withdrawing a programmed response that Nokia’s Lumia 900 is the best smartphone around. It all started last week when Siri replied “Nokia Lumia 900” when asked “What is the best smartphone?” This, of course, caused some controversy. But Siri seems to have changed its mind as asking that same question of the voice recognition tool now only results in a response of "The one you're holding," or "You're kidding, right?"

This is good news for Apple, but Nokia has accused Apple of fiddling with Siri’s programming in order to change its response. Nokia spokeswoman Tracy Postill said in a statement, "Apple positioned Siri as the intelligent system that's there to help, but clearly if they don't like the answer, they override the software."




Edited by Brooke Neuman
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TechZone360 Web Editor

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