On Tuesday, January 5th, Walt Disney Corporation released a new technology, called KeyChest, that enables customers to purchase films or television shows from distributors, then store them on remote servers, and finally play them on different media such as TVs, PCs, and cell phones. The primary objective behind this move is to enable viewers to access this movie from anywhere, allow for easy storage, and also solve the problem of converting the media into different forms that are compatible with different playing devices.

KeyChest is primarily going to be run by a third party, and Walt Disney is still negotiating with content distributors, cable companies and telecommunications services to make this possible and hopes to deploy it by the end of this year.

KeyChest is also intended to be a multi-corporate venture, according to the statement made by Kelly Summers, vice president of digital distribution at Disney. The idea behind this is that consumers won’t have much of a variety to choose from if only Disney is involved.

Further, KeyChest is hoped to give a boost to the movement of digital distribution of media that has been long in the offing. Now, a consumer can purchase a movie from a participating store, following which, the account with the telecom services and cable companies would be advised to show that the movie could be viewed by him/her.

However, consumers will not have direct acces to KeyChest. Rather, retailers will first verify if the consumer already has the legal rights for the media, and then make it available for viewing.

As internet connections become increasingly faster, music downloads are slowly giving way to viewing of streaming media. The digital market is fast changing from something that provides on-demand music downloads to one that provides fast access to streaming media.

Digital music retailer Apple’s recent acquisition of Lala, a streaming music provider, shows that the digital download industry is acknowledging the cooling down of digital music downloads. A primary reason for this is that, until recently, the only way to play your favorite song on your PC or a portable player was to download it. However, with new tech coming in such as web-enabled TVs, services like Spotify, Lala, etc. this is no longer the case.

Moreover, nothing can beat the flexibility and user-friendliness of streaming media. Hence, the digital download industry is trying to tap into this new way of experiencing music as soon as they can. For instance, Apple can sell newer devices that access streaming media to those who still use older generation MP3 players.

An interesting point will be to note the response of Amazon to this shift. Its online music retail store is the second largest in the U.S., right after Apple’s iTunes. So far, Amazon has shown great agility in changing with the times, with issue of unbeatable offers and sales. A simple example is the 25 Days of Freein which 25 holiday themed tracks were made available free of charge. Whether it retains its flexibility in these changing times will be one of the big questions in 2010, when streaming media is going to get a bigger role than ever before.

If the term AR Drone’ seems like gibberish to you, then you have a lot to catch up on. A team of ten engineers developed a small, helicopter like drone that was released to an unsuspecting public at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas last week. This drone is controlled by an iPhone and looks somewhat like a flying saucer right out of a sci-fi flick.

The drone can move at 18 kilometers per hour, stay airborne for 15 minutes after a 60-minute battery charge, has a maximum range of 50 meters and weighs just over 300 grams. In addition, it streams live video from two cameras to the pilot’s phone via wi-fi.

Although seeing the drone in action might bring to mind military intelligence and spying technology, its creators have different plans for it altogether namely video gaming. The idea is that you pilot the drone and take it into the air, then the targets that the cameras capture are converted into virtual targets on your phone at which you can then fire missiles and operate other gaming actions you play the game on your phone based on the feed from the drone’s cameras.

This is what the AR in AR Drone’ stands for Augmented Reality, where the physical reality is merged with the virtual one to create a gaming experience like never before.

Augmented reality is not a new concept it is present in fields such as medicine, defense, navigation, and even education. However, by taking it to the world of gaming, the AR Drone might just revolutionize gaming in a way that we had never dreamt of.

EMI Music imprints Capitol, Caroline, and Virgin, and EMI Music Publishing have recently filed a lawsuit against Vimeo.com (a video sharing website that falls under a division of online media conglomerate IAC). In the murky areas of copyright law, this is a significant development because it looks into the yet unaddressed issue of fans uploading videos that have copyrighted content (mostly audio) in it.

EMI’s suit will tackle two primary concerns. The first is whether video sharing websites are liable for copyright infringement. This is keeping in mind that they allow, and profit from, user-uploaded copyrighted content.
The second concern is whether lip dubs, and similar videos, are cases of copyright infringement. (Lip dubs are videos in which people lip synch to professional recordings.)

Most labels have agreements with YouTube, that enables sharing of revenue gained from such videos. However, not all labels have been able to make such agreements, and not all video sharing sites have been included in such deals so far.

The other side states that fan-made videos are examples of fair use, tolerated under copyright law as an accommodation to noncommercial, transformative creativity. However, as EMI duly points out Vimeo.com is anything but noncommercial.

This area of copyright has few precedents in terms of law. Besides the EMI suit, there are other suits lined up in 2010 that might possibly bring clarity to these issues. Examples are Stephanie Lenz’s lawsuit where she is fighting UMG for taking down a YouTube video of her toddler son dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”. Also in line is Don Henley’s action against U.S. Senate candidate Chuck DeVore (R-Calif.) for using “The Boys of Summer” and “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” in “parody” political videos.

Bad Behaviour is an excellent protection tool for your PHP oriented websites. It shields your website from the intrusive activities of spammers and email harvesters that hack your personal data. Further, they shield your website from being spammed with junk and scraps. Also, this tool identifies various website cracking tools and dissuade their invasions.

This application basically works by first validating all sorts of requests placed at your website. If the request is detected as a potent spam bot, then, it blocks your website from responding to the request. And, instead sends across error code message. It is a great tool to help you reduce the server time and CPU time. Further, it keeps a check on the database activities taking place in website. It controls the bandwidth utilized on processing robots which are a source of attracting junk and spams to your site.

Bad Behavior is an amazing tool for the security of your website. It is completely different from other anti-spam tools available on internet. This tool specifically targets the method and the path via which the spam gets delivered to your website. This is an efficient method, as it saves your system from umpteen malicious activities from taking place. Thus, it offers you reliable security measures not only against spam but also other harmful activities like virus attacks, invasion by malicious software etc.

This is a standalone software and does not require the installation of any other application. It uses an inbuilt connector to connect with other web based applications like wordpress, Joomla, phpBB, mediawiki etc. Further, it has provisions to protect the static pages in HTML format hosted by some specific web servers.

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Personalizing cursors can be fun ! And more fun when you make your favorite Disney characters as your cursors and the kids at home would love it ! If you thought customizing your cursor was a difficult task, then you were wrong as it is a no brainer job with the readily and freely available software AniTuner, which allows users to personalize their cursors.

This means that you can now animate your cursors and revamp their mundane look. You can do this by importing your favourite animated images in the format of GIF and then animate your cursor frame by frame. You can further, customize the appearance of your system’s Windows as per your desires. Next, you can also convert images to animations and display them on your website, emails, manuals, applications and documents.

The striking feature of AniTuner is that its inbuilt features can generate animated cursors from your regular animated GIF and AVI images. In addition, you can also import the existing static images in formats like BMP, PNG, GIF, PSD, ICO, CUR and turn them into animated cursors. Also, you can edit, remove and replace the frames of animated cursors with the help of this tool. You can further manipulate the duration of the animation by accessing the preview feature of this tool. The size of the cursors created by this tool can vary between different sizes. Also, the color depth of the cursor can vary from 1bpp to 32bpp.

This application offers special support to 32 bit cursors equipped with 8-bit alpha channel. When you download the installation kit of AniTuner, you get a help file, an animated tutorial file in Flash format and some really good samples of animated cursors. All this is available for free download. You do not need the aid of any other software for accessing the features of this application.

Have fun customizing and be rest assured that your friends will be amazed once they see what you have and will soon want something similar for themselves !!

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HTTrack is a web copier freeware that functions as an offline browser program. It helps you download an website to a directory on your system. Practically, you can download any website and browse the site even if you do not have internet connection.

This end is achieved by the software by creating directories and transferring images, HTML and files to your system from the concerned server. The software even retains the link structure of the actual site.

This attribute permits the user to open from your browser, the reflection of the original website transferred to the local directory, and browse all links. Thus you get the same browsing experience offline, as you would have obtained online. You can recover files that are beyond the domain, that have to be arrived at through links by activating the get-file-near-links’ option.

HTTrack also updates the mirror site so that you can view the latest version of the site offline whenever you choose. It can also continue downloads from the point they were broken if the process gets interrupted. This will save downloading time and avert the need of starting the download all over again if it gets broken up.

HTTrack has two versions, each catering to different operating systems. While Win HTTrack is compatible with Windows 9x/ XP/ NT/2000, Web HTTrack is compatible with Linux, BSD and UNIX operating systems. HTTrack when using original sources is Mac compatible. HTTrack will operate on Windows NT only if the user logs in with administrator privileges.

The software is 100% ad ware and spy ware free. This user configurable software has an elaborate online help system.

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If you are looking for a free intelligent search software, then Copernic Agent is one of the best in the market.

Copernic Agent enhances the efficiency of your web searches. This highly intelligent program queries the best search engines to bring out incredible search results that are of superior quality and with great relevance to your search keywords.

The higher quality of the results is due to the wider coverage of the web by this software. It queries more than 90 search-engines, rids the duplicate results and gives you the best conflated information from all these sites.

Besides giving you an index of search results the software permits you to email them to friends, generate reports, save pages and even get rid of damaged links. It creates a search history and saves the searched pages for future use. Filtering and sorting results is also possible with this software. Layouts and choice of search engines can be customized.

The software is compatible with Windows95, 98, 2000, ME and XP with IE 4.0SP1.

The software’s interface is very user friendly. The software comes in three versions-basic, personal and professional. The basic version is free, where as the personal and professional editions come at a price, but they also allow you to customize your search besides performing the search. They help you reach hidden details and also have more advanced attributes for enabling search management.

The professional version is more advanced and provides you a useful summary as well as analysis of the results returned by this software. It helps you keep track of web page information changes as well as latest search results.

The software easily integrates with IE so that searches can be executed using this program from the IE browser itself. Online help is available.

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Launchy, a freeware has a tiny footprint but is extremely effectual. It is meant to aid users who have many software and applications installed in their system. The software helps such users to open their programs easily without lags. The software is a stunner with curved frame and transparent edges.

The use of this software ensures that how many ever programs you install on your computer your desktop is not overcrowded with shortcut-icons. It is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista OS and Linux OS. You can make Launchy run on Win 2000 by downloading a dll file and unzipping this dll file to the launchy directory.

Launchy is thus a program that single handedly performs the functions of your start menu and file manager and lets you forget your desktop shortcut icons. Launchy forms an index of the start menu and helps you launch project files, documents, bookmarks folders and more with simple keystrokes. This saves you from the trouble of browsing the programs list on the start menu for locating a desired program.

Once it has been launched it works stashed away in the background. The program launchy can be called for assistance and made visible by hitting Alt+spacebar. Type the initial few letters of the program name and Launchy will proffer you many matches. Hit enter when the program you wish to open is displayed. Hitting the same keys again or hitting escape button will close the program. Alternatively Launchy will also operate on startup.

Launchy is by far the most excellent program launcher released in recent times.

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CurrPorts is a freeware designed to provide you with a list of all presently opened ports in your system. These ports could be UDP ports or TCP/IP ports.

Besides the name of opened ports additional associated information about the process responsible for opening the port is exhibited too. Such information includes process name, process path, process version details, process creation time and creator name.

You can also use this software to shut unnecessary TCP connections. You can make use of Command-line for shutting unwanted connections. The software can destroy the procedure responsible for opening ports.

The software permits saving the list of opened ports in XML, HTML files or in text file like tab de-limited. The command-line option can be used for saving the index of open ports to files.

Greater details about distant IP address can be obtained by integrating the software with IPNetInfo utility. Advanced filters feature helps screen only open ports you desire to monitor.

CurrPorts also permits the user to save details of alterations-added and detached connections to the log file which is brought up to date only when the list is manually refreshed, or by switching on auto-refresh option.

The software is compatible with Windows NT, XP, 2000, 2003, 2008, Vista and 7. A special edition of this version can be used on Windows x64. In Windows ME/98 the software will not exhibit process information.

The software can be used without installation procedure and extra DLL files as it is of the nature of individual executable.

The new feature introduced in version 1.65 is the drag-and-drop icon on the toolbar which when dragged and dropped in the application window, filters ports by chosen application so that only this application’s open ports are displayed.

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