(Platform for Search of Audiovisual Resources Across Online Spaces) will be focused on multimedia and audiovisual searching, similar to French engine Quaero.

FAST announced that its goal is to implement "a next-generation audiovisual search platform that is designed, developed, and used collaboratively by a worldwide consortium of academic and commercial players." Thirteen partners from nine European countries (Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Austria, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) will participate actively in this project.

Furthermore, the development of Pharos is being financed by private and public funds: The European Commission recently released €8.5 million of the €11.2 million pledged.

In any case, Pharos has understood the importance of developing a site that can index audiovisual content at a time when platforms such as YouTube and DailyMotion already offer several million videos every day.

FAST estimates it will need three years to successfully complete the new project. An initial version of Pharos could thus be launched online by the end of 2009.

Although strong European competition seems unlikely in the short run, Google should keep an eye on these new developments. You never know…..

The European Commission has taken a keen interest in mobile applications. At a time when contactless payments and other mobile services are on the rise, Brussels has decided to financially back the StoLPan (Store Logistics and Payment with NFC) project as part of the European Information Society Technologies (IST) program. StoLPan is run by companies, universities, and European user groups and focuses on Near Field Communications (NFC) technology.

The consortium’s partners include manufacturers such as Motorola, Bull, Sun, and NPX Semiconductors; banks such as Banca Popolare di Vicenza; and universities, including in Budapest, Hungary.

It aims to develop an open architecture for the development and deployment of NFC applications on mobile devices. Manufacturers and operators are keenly interested in NFC technology, which enables contactless data exchange. It opens up all kinds of new possibilities for mobile services. Some systems already exist, like contactless payment (currently being tested in Strasbourg, France by NRJ Mobile and CIC-Crédit Mutuel), and using a mobile device as a transportation pass (available on public transportation in Rome, Italy and being introduced in France in 2008 with the Pass Navigo).

The convergence of mobile phones and NFC technology, unveiled in the Nokia 6131 NFC during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, should also engender other possibilities like using a cell phone as an ID badge during trade shows and conferences, and sharing information.

However, there are still several issues to overcome before this technology can actually be deployed. From a technical standpoint, compatibility problems have to be resolved. Then there’s security: A recent study urges market players to develop effective security systems to protect these new applications from piracy. In response to these issues, StoLPaN will develop an “NFC ecosystem” in order to define and address these various hindrances and accelerate large-scale marketing of mobile devices with contactless applications.

An initial report is planned for summer 2007 as part of a program to be completed by 2009.

In France, banking sector players such as Mutual CIC-Crédit and telecoms such as Orange, Bouygues, and SFR pooled resources in November 2006 to develop and test a contactless payment solution. There’s strength in numbers!

A common cultural identity for Europe? Europeana, the European Digital Library (EDL), wants to collect a vast number of European scientific and cultural works and make the collection available for free at a single site with 2 million documents by 2008 and 6 million by 2010 (source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France). The project began to take shape back in 2005 in reaction to Google’s plans to digitize millions of works then charge fees to access them.

Long in Web limbo, the European Digital Library could soon become a reality, at least in France. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), the country’s representative on the project, has announced a March launch for the French EDL interface. Does Google Book Search finally have cause to worry?

Backstory of a long gestation

Google’s December 2004 announcement that it was launching Google Print elicited a reaction in Europe, namely fears that culture would be redefined through an Anglo-Saxon prism and deformed. In the January 23-24, 2005 issue of Le Monde, BNF President Jean-Noël Jeanneney published the article Quand Google défie l’Europe. He wrote this op-ed piece to wake up Europe, fight for preservation of the universal and inalienable right of access to knowledge, lay digital claim to the BNF collection, and organize European access to culture.

His appeal was heeded. In 2005, Jacques Chirac and the heads of state of Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, and Poland instigated a movement to digitize works held in European collections. Twenty-three national libraries throughout Europe joined BNF in signing the motion that it initiated. In September 2005 the European Commission took action, soliciting public comment and publishing i2010: Digital Libraries, an analysis of the stakes raised by the Internet in building a European cultural heritage. In a March 2, 2006 press release, the European Commission stated that Europe’s collective memory would be “put on the Web via a European Digital Library” using the TEL (The European Library) infrastructure, a platform that provides access to the catalog of every national library in Europe.

The digital library is finally becoming a reality!

As French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres announced on January 23 in his review of digital cultural projects underway (in French), the EDL project is, after a long delay, “now entering its operational phase.

BNF is putting the finishing touches on the beta version of the French building block of the EDL. The official launch—with access to 10,000 documents—is to happen in March, timed to coincide with the Salon du Livre book trade show. By the end of November 2007, 30,000 works should be available. From that point forward, another 100,000 are to be added to the online collection every year until the number reaches 500,000. Progress is less concrete in the rest of Europe, but 19 national libraries have already made their digital collections available through the TEL site, and the 45 member libraries of the Conference of European National Librarians

(CNEL) are expected to join the project over the next five years (source: BNF).

Europeana versus Google Book Search: free or fee?

At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week in San Francisco, a special track was devoted to online games. The market potential is breathtaking as we near the worldwide landmark of three billion mobile phones. But game publishers are aware they have so far failed to capture the interest of these users who are new to games.

For the opening keynote speech, Game Developers Conference Mobile attendees were in for a treat with Trip Hawkins, the founder of video game giant Electronic Arts and now head of Digital Chocolate, a mobile game publisher whose titles include Tower Bloxx and MLSN Sports Picks. The gaming veteran was there to deliver a wake up call though. “We must create a new experience for a new customer. Hardcore gamers only represent 5% of players on mobiles, we must reach the other 95%,” he told a room packed full with fellow developers and publishers.
To Hawkins’ regret, the current offering is far from stellar. “Of the top 20 games, only 15% are original. Another 15% are expensive property licences that do not create any value and provide an inferior experience. The rest are retro games like Pacman, Tetris and Solitaire. This is not the way we will expand. Every new medium has to find what it is good at,” Hawkins urged attendees. “Even though it has limitations, we must think of the mobile as its own platform and developers must have a craftsman mentality to embrace the challenge.”

Figures about the mobile market by Telephia
(click to enlarge)

Figures presented at the conference by market-research firm Telephia showed that, during Q4 2006, more than 17 million Americans downloaded a game on their cell phone generating 151 million dollars in revenues. EA Mobile takes the lion’s share with 27,5% of revenue shares, followed by Gameloft and Glu Mobile who both have about 10% and a slew of about 90 other players trying to cash in on this lucrative market. Among the most popular titles in terms of the share of downloads are Tetris (EA Mobile), Zuma (Glu Mobile) and UNO Challenge (Oasys Mobile). Another finding from Telephia is that 65% of those who purchase games for their cell phones are women and 40% are users between 25 and 36. Not your average hardcore player. “We don’t know who are our customers are,” confirmed John Szeder, CEO of mobile studio Mofactor. “They are disappointed by their first experience because of the generic games offered by carriers and they will never come back.” Szeder has a few suggestions for developers: “Make games that can be played with one thumb, include tutorials, but quickly get into the game, think about mechanisms that encourage them to play again, hook them up with their friends.”

Social networking and customization, two concepts that have been successful on the Net, were indeed buzzwords at GDC this year and mobile gaming was no exception. “Mobile games must borrow ideas that work from sites like YouTube and Twitter since this is your competition for people’s entertainment time: incorporate player-created content, social features and tools for sharing content,” advised wife-and-husband team Amy Jo and Scott Kim of Shufflebrain whose clients include Electronic Arts, eBay and Yahoo.

Paul Coulton, a game developer and researcher at the Lancaster University in England, pointed attendees in another direction. Based on the advances of technology and his own experiments, he painted a picture of RFID-enabled phones being able to download games off a poster or use real-life objects for a mixed-reality gaming experience. He encouraged developers to make use of the integrated camera and cited the example of Buddy Bash where the player is boxing against an opponent whose face can be replaced by that of one’s friends. Another exciting development for game developers, he said, is the integration of motion sensors and GPS devices into cell phones.

At the end of the first day, attendees gathered to attend the Mobile Game Innovation Hunt where 14 developers presented new games under the cheers or boos of the crowd. The two winners were Tornado Mania, a global warming-inspired game in which a tornado tears through a city, and Sil in which the player manipulates objects to make them fit shadows. None of the presenters seemed to have headed the advice given earlier in the day with the possible exception of a Danish developer whose game used the phone’s Bluetooth capability.

This week in the You Tube show, more of animation films! There are lot of films I love on you Tube and only four last week was not enough to be a good reflection of the diversity of films you can find… Here are some more, enjoy!

Animator vs. Animation Part II
The follow-up of last week’s first video. This time Animator is experiencing more trouble to get rid of the creature… 

Kiwi
A Master’s Thesis Animation Film, funny and promising!

Heck No! (I’ll never listen to tekno)
A great stop motion animated film about robots and technos… Will President Bush

declare a new war after that?

Love Letters
You want to propose your girlfriend, make it simple! What you need is a team of 20 people crazy about animation, three months, a very big screen and Bob’s your uncle! And you can even get on TV for that…

“YouTube is currently serving 100 million videos per day, with more than 65,000 videos being uploaded daily. According to Hitwise, YouTube videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online and people are spending an average of 17 minutes per session on the site. According to Nielsen NetRatings, YouTube has nearly 20 millions unique users per month.”

These are the latest traffic and stats figures, a combination of in-house and third-party data, currently displayed on the video-sharing site. They look impressive on the face of it. The only problem is that YouTube won’t reveal how it keeps track of video views and that companies compiling online metrics often invoke “proprietary technology”. Digg, another community site, has been the subject of some controversy about its popularity as measured by the number of users.

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High-tech cars are seductive in many ways. Navigating more efficiently to one’s destination while finding “points of interest” en route, packing hours of music and movies to occupy the driver and the passengers on long drives and surfing the Internet while on the road are technologies that can improve the driving experience. As long as the driver keeps focused on driving, that is.

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Advertising on mobile phones started modestly. A few years ago, campaigns were tied to TV commercials and required entering a code on the phone to receive a text message. Most early adopters were found in Europe where text messaging has always been more popular.

Since those early days, multimedia-enabled phones that connect to the Web have become increasingly available, making jazzier advertising possible. MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) can deliver rich graphics, audio and video which make for more compelling ads.

According to figures released in November by CTIA/The Wireless Association, there are 227 million wireless subscribers and 57% of them use more than voice services. Mobiles are so widespread that advertisers can’t ignore this new way of reaching consumers.

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