AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge

Disrupting Automotive: Using AR to Pick Your Next Ride

Nissan’s teamed up with the versatile and endlessly-surprising Kinect to enable people to check out its 2013 Pathfinder, inside and outside, from all angles, with a natural series of gestures. And it’s pretty specific, lending you a sense of proportion for the trunk space and even indicating where your head falls in the driver’s seat.

The idea is to give you enough sensory information via augmented reality (AR) to make an informed decision about whether the Pathfinder is right for you. (It was certainly right for my parents at least three times in their car-buying history.)

Question is, how many cars have been sold by new car smell alone? Somebody better be pumping that in from someplace.

Any Film You'd Like, So Long As It's A Paramount Film — And You Jump Through 12 Hoops

parislemon:

Nathan Ingraham on the new Paramount app for Xbox:

As with most of the other Xbox 360 media-playing apps, you’ll need an Xbox Live Gold membership, and you’ll also need to get Paramount and UltraViolet accounts set up (if you’re planning to purchase). Of course, the movies are still quite pricey (most films are $19.99 for the HD version, though rental prices are a bit more in-line with the rest of the market), and the app won’t play any UltraViolet movies you may have purchased from other studios. You also can’t buy or rent anything directly from the app itself — you’ll have to do all of that on your computer. 

Sounds wonderful. I’m confused — do studios think that people care which studio the films they watch came from? Why would anyone use this app over Xbox’s built-in movie store? Why would anyone use this, period?

And man oh man is UltraViolet a turd.

Couldn’t resist the urge to repost this. The movie business is wildly political and there are a lot of hands angling to get paid every time you produce a new business model, which makes opening new avenues — like an app on Xbox — complicated on the best of days.

But don’t even bother doing something like this unless you can justify it from a customer perspective. And there are two huge truths that leap out in this piece: clients don’t care, or at the very least, don’t remember, what studios are producing their films. Really, unless you’ve made serious waves like Pixar, it’s not in their interest. Secondly, why would anyone opt to do this versus Xbox’s movie store or your basic Netflix? They’re established, simple models that don’t overcomplicate. Nobody’s gonna go out of their way to click 18 more times just because you’re The Studio. That information isn’t precious to anybody else but you. And we won’t even talk about the additional investment of time and money in exchange for minimal value.

Scared, Netflix? Amazon Prime is on Xbox 360

The dominant console in US homes already has Netflix. Now, it has Amazon Prime too. This means 17,000 films and TV series, including Downton Abbey, Mad Men and Mission Impossible 4 (Amazon calls it MI:3 in the press release ha ha!), all available through your M$oft console, with fancy Kinect menu scrolling if you like. One feature we like: WhisperSync. Like with Kindle books, you can stop a film on one device and pick up from the same point on another (eg. Kindle Fire or your laptop PC).

The cost: $80 (€65) a year, plus an Xbox Live membership ($50, but you’ve probably got that already if you’ve got an Xbox). Netflix’s streaming offer starts at $8/month, so, as our US homies would say, “do the math.”

Is this the end of Netflix’s dominance, or just the start of Amazon’s streaming adventure? We gather the Kindle Fire, the first device to feature Prime streaming, isn’t doing so well: so we’ll opt for the latter for now. Especially given the above so-keen-it’s-nearly-desperate video. Still, a space to be watched, if ever there was one.

Source: Engadget

Could Microsoft start selling Xbox 360 consoles as if they’re mobile phones? That’s what The Verge is suggesting. It claims that Microsoft is about to unveil a new scheme where people will be able to pay $99 to get an Xbox 360 plus Kinect motion controller – but only if they sign up to a $15 monthly subscription for two years. That’s pretty much the deal you strike when buying a swanky smartphone, and it could be very disruptive in the console hardware market, which is starting to wind up for its next generation of hardware in one or two years’ time.

Could Microsoft start selling Xbox 360 consoles as if they’re mobile phones? That’s what The Verge is suggesting.

It claims that Microsoft is about to unveil a new scheme where people will be able to pay $99 to get an Xbox 360 plus Kinect motion controller – but only if they sign up to a $15 monthly subscription for two years.

That’s pretty much the deal you strike when buying a swanky smartphone, and it could be very disruptive in the console hardware market, which is starting to wind up for its next generation of hardware in one or two years’ time.