The video below will explain how you can convert iTunes music into ringtones for iPhone on a PC.
The video below will explain how you can convert iTunes music into ringtones for iPhone on a PC.
It’s 8 a.m. in a San Diego hotel ballroom, and the annual DEMOfall conference is under way. VCs and journalists stifle yawns and peck at laptops. After a morning of scripted pitches by startups that promise to “integrate smartphone remote mobile applications” or “monetize social networks by enabling live social interaction around content,” the coffee break can’t come soon enough.
Then Jason Carlson of Emo Labs, a last-minute addition to the schedule, wheels a TV and a set of giant speakers onto the stage. They’re playing the Beach Boys. Carlson whips the speaker box off to expose a sheet of clear plastic, which is producing the sound.
Suddenly no caffeine is required, no jargon necessary. Emo has invented invisible speakers. There are audible gasps. Dozens of digital cameras flash at once. Those same jaded observers start cheering.
“I didn’t think I could give a good presentation that wasn’t one-on-one,” Carlson tells me later. “I was worried I was going to be a failure.” Emo goes on to win $500,000 and the conference’s DEMOgod title.
By some measures, these are lean years for commercial innovation. In a recent Fortune Small Business/Zogby International poll, just 19% of small business owners said they aimed to introduce a new product or service in 2010; that’s an 8% decline from a year earlier. Among those looking to launch, a sizable majority — 77% — described their product as an “incremental improvement” rather than “game changing.” Like those scripted startups at DEMO, most entrepreneurs seem to be playing it safe.
But look closely at the few who are innovating — and at the products that make you go ooh — and another narrative emerges.
Hardware is back with a vengeance. Most successful products coming out of small tech companies in the early 2000s were Internet plays, like Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Facebook or Salesforce.com (CRM). That territory has now been thoroughly mined. The most exciting products of 2010 will look a lot more like … well, like the breathtaking science-fiction stuff we always expected from the 21st century.
This, our sixth annual Next Little Thing feature, examines four companies whose products have the potential to revolutionize how we work and play. Apart from Emo Labs, there’s WiTricity, which is making electricity as wireless as Wi-Fi; Plastic Logic, whose flexible electronic reader is a generation beyond Amazon’s Kindle; and Emotiv, whose headset reads your brain, letting you control a computer without touching it.
Despite the diversity of their products, these companies have much in common. All were founded by scientists who did groundbreaking research during the 2000s. In all four cases, the founders recruited business leaders with the chops to commercialize their ideas. All are ambitious, yet modest enough to know they can’t grow without hundreds of developers and equipmentmakers. And all have one major hurdle to overcome: mass skepticism.
As Eric Giler, CEO of WiTricity, says of being headhunted by the company: “I thought, ‘Well, this is impossible. But if it’s true, the world will change.’”
Invisible Sound
Invisible Power
Flexible Reader
Reading Brain Signals
After gaining a reputation for its immersive first-person Call of Duty action video games based in World War II, game developer Infinity Ward‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2′ : Creativity and controversy wanted to stretch its creative muscles with an original, contemporary game.
The result, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, won numerous awards as 2007′s best game and has sold more than 14 million units worldwide.
With the sequel, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (out today, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, rated M for ages 17-up, prices start at $60), Infinity Ward looks to test the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in video games. Players can choose to take part in a terrorist attack against civilians, and they defend a bombed-out nation’s capital.
“The coolest thing is you don’t exactly know who is going to win,” says creative director Jason West. “It’s actually scary. (A near-future setting) allows it to be more real and, I hope, resonate with people more than the rah-rah good vs. evil stuff of the past.”
In the first Modern Warfare, players hunted down power-hungry ultranationalist Russian leader Imran Zakhaev. Five years later, a new leader named Vladimir Makarov has risen to power, and an elite international task force (the player included) must pursue him.
Think 24 with terrorists threatening the USA and Jack Bauer forced to use any means necessary. Or Tom Clancy’s 1994 book Debt of Honor, in which the U.S. Capitol is destroyed during a joint session of Congress, killing the president and other officials.
To help pull off its thriller, Infinity Ward enlisted Hollywood hands including film composer Hans Zimmer and NCIS writer/executive producer Jesse Stern, both of whom were impressed. The game, Zimmer says, “takes you to lots of exotic locales and … has an emotional darkness to it, where sometimes you go, ‘I just can’t believe they are going to do this now,’ and then they do it. It’s full of those sort of moments where it just takes things further than anyone would expect. I think it is less a geographic journey than an emotional one.”
In recent days, the game’s envelope-pushing campaign has had some hiccups. A viral video promoting the game was pulled off the Net because it used a homosexual slur (not from the game) as an acronym. And leaked video showing the player participating in the terrorist attack on civilians raised alarms.
Modern Warfare 2 is “not a play-it-safe game,” says Geoff Keighley, host of Spike’s GameTrailers TV. “The pace is really well-scripted and, like 24, you never know where it is going to go next. … I think they want to push buttons with this game.”
The controversy is probably not over, says Adam Sessler, co-host of cable channel G4 TV series X-Play. He expects the terrorist scene to ignite another wave of public furor. “But at least the game will be out, and that element can be addressed in the context of the game itself.”
In designing the game, the developers spent a lot of time figuring out how to best present that scene. (Note that players can skip it if they prefer.) “We knew it was going to be upsetting,” Stern says. “Particularly where it falls in the game, it gets you pretty twisted up. I hope it makes some people a little upset.”
An argument can be made that portraying terrorism in games is less appropriate because of the medium’s interactive nature. But that’s not fair to game creators, Sessler says.
“There is a helplessness for the player in that sequence and games, somehow, are not being allowed to go into that creative territory. It’s always somehow supposed to be typified as ‘fun.’ This will elicit a reaction and create a motivation for the successive events that happen in the rest of the game,” he says. “I’m not going to go so far as to say it is right or wrong. I feel that is really in the eyes of the beholder. What I do feel is defensible is it is within Infinity Ward’s right to be creative and move into kind of a taboo area for video games.”