Tag: mickey mouse

Apple launches Mickey Mouse watch

Posted on March 9, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-09 at 18.15.41A vast audience is watching Apple right now tell us how wonderful the iWatch is but it has to be linked to an iPhone.

An Apple watch will tell Uber that you’re around when you arrive at SFO, and you can send messages to your friends to tell them what’s going on, provided you have an iPhone.

An executive showed us live how the other world lives – when he arrives in New York he’s staying at the W hotel and he can unlock his door and his watch is his room key. We’ve stayed at the W New York – you need an LED torch to find your room, the place is so dark.

When he goes into his room, the executive can use his watch to find out what the music is playing in his darkened room.

The demo is delivering messages like there’s no tomorrow and we’re beginning to wonder how long the battery on the iWatch is going to last given all of this activity.

Apple is trusting the Internet of Things (IoT) will be an Apple thing

To rapturous applause, Apple showed off apps and told us that the iWatch can save us all time.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, looking very ultra cool said that when the developer community was unleashed, we will all be surprised. There are plenty of apps for the Apple iWatch.

He claimed the iWatch will work for 18 hours and “at the end of the day”.

Apple is announcing three collections – one with colourful bands – the aluminium used in one of its collections is not “run of the mill” aluminium. The Apple iWatch sport is actually an alloy as light as aluminium but 60 percent stronger, Apple claimed. It’s a magnesium zinc aluminium alloy. It starts at $350 and has loads of bands.

Apple is not using ordinary stainless steel, it is using extraordinary stainless steel, no doubt carefully extruded through the marketing department. Apple is offering lots of different SKUs and the pricing is almost impossible to figure out. It’s even doing a solid gold watch starting at $10,000. April 10th will be the day when it all starts to roll out…

We’ll have more on this tomorrow.

Disney patents anti-pirate search engine

Posted on November 3, 2014 by - News

hookMickey Mouse outfit, Disney has patented a search engine which it claims can keep the internet pirate free.

While it did not say where it would leave its Peter Pan and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise which rely on pirates, it does beg the question why Disney would develop such a search engine.

Disney has obtained a patent for a search engine that ranks sites based on various “authenticity” factors. One of the goals of the technology is to filter pirated material from search results while boosting the profile of copyright and trademark holders’ websites.

The patent is titled “Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements,” one of the patent’s main goals is to prevent pirated movies and other illicit content from ranking well in the search results.

 

According to Disney, their patent makes it possible to “enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites.”

“For example, a manipulated page for unauthorized sales of drugs, movies, etc. might be able to obtain a high popularity rating, but what the typical user will want to see is a more authentic page,” they explain.

Its patent describes a system that re-ranks search results based on an “authenticity index.” This works twofold, by promoting sites that are more “authoritative” and filtering out undesirable content.

“In particular, embodiments enable more authoritative search results … to be ranked higher and be more visible to a user. Embodiments furthermore enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites, child pornography websites, and/or the like,” Disney writes.

What Disney would do is give “official” sites priority when certain terms relate to a property of a company. These “authority” weights can include trademarks, copyrighted material, and domain name information.

What this will mean giving corporates more authority than those who might not like it. Therefore, a film review site will have less status than Disney’s official market site. Wikipedia will be much lower on the status list.

“The Disney.go.com web page may be associated with an authenticity weight that is greater than the authenticity weight associated with the encyclopaedia web page because Disney.go.com is the official domain for The Walt Disney Company. As such, with respect to the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs™ film, the Disney.go.com web page may be considered more authoritative (and thus more authentic) than the encyclopaedia web page,” Disney writes.

It is not clear what Disney will do with its new patent. While it is possible to see that other companies might like it, it is generally only the corporates who care enough to want this sort of product, most people would stick to Google, Yahoo or Bing, where they know they will not just get the company line.