Laser projectors promise to deliver brighter 3D films

This week for the first time ever a cinema audience watched a laser-projected 3D movie at the same brightness as they would have seen the 2D version.

Christie's new, 6P digital light projection system may cost 10 times more than traditional 2D projectors, but it sports one projector for each eye.

Recent box office figures indicate that audiences in the US preferred to see the 3D version of a movie back in 2009, but now favour 2D. The new system aims to make the 3D experience brighter, crisper and clearer.

Christie also claims the new system is more comfortable to watch because it has got rid of the polarisation used in 99% of 3D cinema systems.

The old technique involved using a single projector to beam two rapidly alternating video streams, each captured at a slightly different perspective to the action.

Polarisation filters in the 3D glasses worn by the viewer then separated the streams so that each eye saw a different one, delivering a sense of depth.

But a side-effect of this method was that the film appeared darker than it would do in 2D.

By contrast, the new system uses two projectors to send the separate images at the same time, allowing both versions to be brighter before they are separated by a new type of glasses. An added benefit is that there appears to be less flicker.

Rather than using polarisation to separate the images, the new system depends on lasers that use different mixes of light wavelengths to create each colour seen on screen. Each of the glasses' two lenses is customised to only allow the wavelengths shown by either one or the other projector through.

Thus each eye gets a full projector's worth of light at the same time.

BBC Click's Dan Simmons travelled to the IBC Convention in Amsterdam to talk to 20th Century Fox's vice president of technology Arjun Ramamurthy and Christie product director, Don Shaw.

Crops Starting To Grow On Fake Moon And Mars Soil

 Q: What exactly does this mean? 

A: Space colonizers will be able to grow from other planets soil mediums. 

If humans ever set up permanent bases on the Moon or Mars, we'll need to be able to grow our own food there. To find out whether that’s actually possible, a team of scientists in the Netherlands planted 14 plant species in soils that simulate the Martian and lunar regolith. It turned out that the Martian soil simulant was better than some Earth soils for growing plant life, which is good news for astronauts. There are a few caveats, but we’ll get to those later.

First, you’re probably wondering what the heck is a soil simulant, and where does it come from? NASA makes them out of our very own terra firma, and you can buy your own here. (Cost: $7.50 for 2 ounces.) The Mars simulant (PDF) comes from a volcanic cone in Hawaii, and has a chemical composition similar to the Mars dirt that the Viking 1 lander analyzed. The Moon simulant (PDF) comes from volcanic ash deposits near Flagstaff, Arizona.

Real Moon and Mars soils appear to contain the essential ingredients that plants need, except for reactive nitrogen (and an abundant water supply). Though the simulant soils closely match the composition and grain size of the real stuff, they also contain trace amounts of the nitrates and ammonium—the nitrogen-based compounds that plants love. So the simulant soil isn’t a perfect model. 

For their experiment, the scientists ordered piles of fake Mars and Moon soil, then scooped them into small pots and planted 14 different species inside -- including carrots, tomatoes, wheat, some common weeds, and four species that turn atmospheric nitrogen into plant food. The scientists also planted seeds in some nutrient-poor soil that they dug up from 30 feet below the river Rhine, for comparison. All in all, they planted 840 pots.

Other scientists have attempted to grow plants in lunar and Martian soil simulants before, but this study appears to be the largest and most extensive to date. And the results were promising. Most of the crops were able to grow on all three kinds of soils. In fact, many thrived better on the Mars simulant soil than the poor river soil -- both in terms of the number of plants that germinated, flowered, and survived to the end of the 50-day experiment, as well as in terms of the total biomass that grew from each pot.

Plants fared worse on the lunar soil. None of the leopard’s bane or field mustard survived to the end of the experiment. Common vetch, a nitrogen-fixing plant, didn’t even germinate. That suggests to the researchers that lunar farmers may need to inoculate the regolith with nitrogen-fixing bacteria instead. That, or use human feces as a manure to provide right kind of nitrogen.

“Our results show that in principle it is possible to grow crops and other plant species in Martian and Lunar soil simulants,” the researchers write. “However, many questions remain…” such as how much water can the soils hold (because the ones in this study seemed to dry out pretty quickly) and how do gravity, light, and other conditions on other worlds affect the plants’ ability to grow?

Exposing Tint’s Financial Data with a Real-Time Revenue Dashboard

Wouldn't it be nice to see your net revenue, average net revenue per quarter, or year, or even average revenue per user in a social interface system? Well, happy to say.... 

Now you can! 

(Credit by "tint.com" & Murial McDonald author of this blog post)

t Tint, we value transparency. Transparency is one of our five company values and we’ve blogged about it several times. Everything at Tint is discussed openly as a team and nothing is hidden, including the salaries of other team members and how much money is in our bank account. We’re also transparent with our customers – about pricing, our product roadmap, and mistakes we make along the way. So when Josh Pigford fromBaremetrics (a platform that helps companies calculate their revenue data) reached out to us to see if we wanted to make our financial data public, it wasn’t a difficult decision. We said yes.

Today, we’re excited to take our transparency to this new level by releasing our real-time revenue dashboard.

We’re Showing You Everything

Whatever we see on our Baremetrics dashboard, you can now see, in real time. Anyone will be able to see our monthly recurring revenue, user churn, a live stream of transactions with customers, and more. In the interests of privacy, the real names of our customers will be replaced with fake names, but the dollar amounts are real. Here are some of the big numbers we’re exposing:

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) 

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is one of our key metrics to evaluate how fast we are growing. This number represents the portion of our revenue that is very likely to continue in the future. With a subscription service like ours, most of our revenue falls into this category. We calculate this by subtracting one-time payments, like insTint update days, from our gross revenue. Multiply this number by 12 and you have your expected annual revenue.

Churn

 

Our Baremetrics dashboard reveals both Revenue Churn and User Churn. These numbers represent the rate at which customers downgrade or cancel their plans, so a low churn is good. When a customer buys two months of Tint and then cancels, that increases our churn. Our user churn looks relatively high, because many of our customers subscribe for just one event/temporary campaign and then cancel until their next event/campaign. Showing clients the advantages of using Tint beyond their events is one strategy we’ve employed to decrease our churn.

Annual Run Rate

Pretty simple: MRR x 12. An estimation of our annual revenue, if conditions from this month continue. We’re growing, so we hope this number keeps growing too. You can see we’ve 10x our annual revenue in 1 year and we are very proud of that.

Customers

Including upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations, our Baremetrics dashboard exposes a lot of information about the flow of clients at Tint. “Active Customers” displays all customers who have paid us within the given time period. This past month, we had 863 active customers, and 98 new customers. Wahoo!

Risks and Rewards of Exposing Financial Data

Not many companies are this transparent about their revenue, financial data, and more. Buffer, another social media startup practicing transparency, and Baremetrics themselves have made their dashboardspublic, but it’s still an unorthodox move. Then again, who ever said startups should make orthodox moves?

We believe this level of transparency is a good idea for a couple of reasons:accountability will push us to grow faster, transparency will encourage customers and investors to trust us, and sharing our financial data may help other entrepreneurs.

Accountability Spurs Growth

Nothing is hidden from the public eye. This means that we’re more accountable for our successes and our failures. Knowing that all of these numbers are out there will push us to increase revenue, decrease user churn, and continue to grow the business at the fast pace we’ve set for ourselves.

On the flip side, if we do poorly one month, there’s no hiding it. Our hope is that this level of transparency will inspire trust. Here are our numbers. Make of them what you will.

Our Numbers Might Help Other Entrepreneurs

We love helping other entrepreneurs. It wasn’t long ago that Tint was tiny and pivoting to stay alive too. If seeing our financial data is useful to them (and we think it will be) then we’re happy to share it. Come. Study our financials. See what’s working. See what’s not. And let us know what you find most helpful!

The Risk: Data Doesn’t Tell the Whole Picture

Our CEO, Tim Sae Koo, has led this push for transparency. But even he has misgivings about putting it all out there. As Tim explained, “Data doesn’t paint the whole picture.” It is easy to look at these numbers and assume you know how a company is doing. But the numbers are only part of the story.

It’s likely there will be months when outsiders look at our dashboard and wonder “Why isn’t this growing as fast as last month?” or “Why did this number dip?” They might assume they know how Tint is doing based on those numbers alone, but they wouldn’t have the whole picture.

The Next Step in Transparency

We’re not going to stop with making our real-time revenue dashboard public.  In the coming weeks, we plan to begin sharing a monthly update with a slew of numbers that help to paint a fuller image of what is going on at Tint. These numbers will include sales metrics, like number of demo requests per month, support metrics, like response time on support tickets, and development metrics, like number of bugs fixed, and much, much more.

We’re excited about this next step in transparency, and we hope you’ll join us on this journey. What other metrics would you like to see from us? Have you seen other startup companies do this well?

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

-Muriel, Content Hero

Want to be a part of this transparent startup and join this journey? TINT IS HIRING!

Tags: financial data, metrics, real-time revenue dashboard, transparency

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Google just Invested $100 Million to Make Solar Panels More Accessable & Affordable for U.S. Homeowners | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building

GOOGLE Invests $100 Million to Make Solar Panels More Affordable for American Homeowners! 

Resource... Inhabitat.com 

Google has just announced its biggest renewable energy purchase to date (and that’s saying something: the company has already invested $5 million in a German solar power plant and bought enough wind energy in Texas to power 170,000 US homes.) Just after Earth Day, Google announced a partnership with solar cell manufacturer SunPower Corporation that will establish a $250 million dollar fund to buy–and then lease–thousands of solar panels to American homeowners.

Google and SunPower claim the initiative will allow Americans to access solar energy at “a cost that’s typically lower than their normal electricity bill.”

FULLY SUSTAINABLE LIVING IS THE FUTURE!

To kick off this ambitious solar leasing initiative, Google has contributed $100 million in cash, while SunPower delivered the remaining $150 million. Google says it chose to partner with SunPower because “[t]hey’re known for having high-quality, high reliability panels which can generate up to 50 percent more power per unit area, with guaranteed performance and lower degradation over time.”

Solar leasing has become an increasingly popular option for those who want to take advantage of rooftop solar power but can’t (or don’t want to) make the necessary upfront investment. Leasing solar panels often means that all maintenance and repairs are left up to the company that owns the equipment. However, it’s important for customers to realize that they will most likely forfeit the  federal tax credit and any cash rebate to the leasing company.

Unlike other solar leasing programs, which lock homeowners into 10 or 15 year agreements, the SunPower/Google initiative will give customers the option to buy their system after six years or at the end of the lease term. Both companies hope thousands of homeowners will be able to finance solar power systems through SunPower as a result of this program, joining the approximately 20,000 Americans already leasing from SunPower.

Read more: Google Invests $100 Million to Make Solar Panels More Affordable for American Homeowners | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building 

How I got a Google PageRank of #3 in 2 weeks for $0.00!

How I got a Google PageRank of #3 in 2 Weeks for $0.00! 

Out of now, the 29 Blog Posts on this Blog, I have not introduced myself, and I especially have not talked about my own success. 

So, my name is Jon Faulconer, I started what is now the largest Organic Wheat Grass Company in the State of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and now Texas with landing WholeFoods as my main account. And, the best part, I started the company February 14th, of 2013, with a whopping $200.00! Which was applied to the fee for getting my Oklahoma Organic Certification, a 25 pound bucket of Hard Red Winter Wheat Berry Grass Seed from the gentleman who actually got me in the industry, being he is known as the "Pioneer of Organics in Oklahoma." So I had a weight on my shoulders that was the size of Mt. Everest to fulfill my end. What did I do? Yes indeed, I started a simple (yet astronomically effective) Wordpress Website. 

The simple Technique I used to skyrocket my SEO!
Content, Picture's, more content and more picture's! Anything you read about increasing your SEO will say, "content content content"! and, they're right! Whether your doing a "Do it yourself website or a blog about trends, people love rich, unique content! Now I wish it was just that easy, but as far as the main factor, is content! You cannot have enough of it. Look at Flickr,  people spend hours a day on there, and its networth exceeds $50 million dollars!  
To further reach the secret to "Skyrocketing your SEO" Subscribe then save organicwheatgreens14@gmail.com to your contact list and receive the whole series for free on the FREE WEBINAR! 

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Shortcuts to everything online!  Making marketing / advertising and making money 1000 times easier! I love this!

6 Brilliant Ideas for Epic Business Blog Posts

6 Brilliant Ideas for Epic Business Blog Posts

I don't want to say it, but, at least 95 percent of business blogs are absolute crap. In some cases, these sites fail because they’re rarely updated, but most of the time, the Achilles heel most business bloggers face is developing content that’s actually interesting to their audiences.
Your customers don’t want to read press release after press release, and they won’t give their attention to articles that read like incognito sales pitches. What they want is what blogger Corbett Barr has described as “epic s***” – content that “makes people think, inspires & motivates them, changes lives, creates value and blows people away with your usefulness.”
If you aren’t yet hitting these heights, any of the following ideas can help take your business blog from ordinary to epic:
1. Radical transparency. Want to really blow people away? Give them your secrets! The idea of radical transparency is often used on financial posts, in which business owners or individuals talk about their income, their outstanding debts or other interesting monetary tidbits (as in the case of Pat Flynn’s income reports on his “Smart Passive Income” website).
Related: Need Ideas for Your Business Blog? Here Are 50
Even if you don’t want to give away your financial info, you can adopt this same “open door” approach by going in-depth on a recent corporate decision or process. It can be scary to open yourself up in this way, but it’s a guaranteed approach to help readers connect with your business on a deeper level.
2. A complete “how-to.” “How-to” posts are always mentioned on lists of recommended blog post formats because readers really respond to them. But how often have you clicked on a “how-to” post, only to discover a sparse list of bullet points that doesn’t leave you any more educated than you were before you arrived on the site?


Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231741#ixzz2uMAsH0Iz

If you want to really plant your mark, make your posts so epic that people walk away with a complete understanding of the process you’re intending on teaching and the main focus of the post (as in the case of the lengthy “How To Use Goodreads” tutorial pictured above). Using a combination of words, images and video files so that any reader can put the steps you’re describing into action is an easy way to generate blog interest.
3. Massive list posts. Again, list posts are a popular blog post format because they do tend to capture more attention than other structures. But that said, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out with lists of five to 10 items. Want to be truly epic? Create a massive list post with around 100 entries (or even more, if you’re feeling ambitious). Check out the following links for great examples of these types of posts:

• “101 Motivational Business Quotes”
• “The Entrepreneur’s Handbook: 101 Resources for First Time Entrepreneurs”
• “84 Styles to Workout Without Any Equipment”

4. Explore a hard truth. There’s so much BS online that readers are sick of it. Despite your spin team’s best efforts, most people know when they’re getting the whitewashed “truth” rather than the real deal.
Related: Bring Traffic to Your Site With These 4 Blogging Alternatives
For this reason, one of the easiest ways out there to gain attention with epic blog content is to explore a hard truth. As an example, check out Common Health’s controversial post, “Why I Quit Medicine.” It isn’t always fun to be so blatantly honest, but your readers will absolutely love you for keeping things real.
5. Long-form thought pieces. To be perfectly clear, “epic” posts don’t have to be long. If you can blow me away with a new idea or a different way of looking at the world in just a few paragraphs, that counts as “epic” in my mind.
But that said, you need to be aware of how well long-form pieces can perform. The State of Digital blog has observed correlations between content length and lower bounce rates, higher engagement rates and longer average time on site. It’s clear that readers want more content -- and it’s up to you to give it to them!
6. Original research. If you truly want to stand out, you’ve got to bring something new to the table. Rehashing the same facts and statistics that are cited over and over again online might provide some value to your readers, but it doesn’t set your business blog apart from others in any kind of meaningful way.
To resonate your readers (and boost your blog’s social shares & status), consider putting together your own original research. Depending on your budget, you can do so using online survey companies, agencies that conduct telephone surveys or even market research firms that orchestrate in-person focus groups. Not only does publishing the results of your work on your blog lead to epic content, it improves your small business’s overall perceived authority and brand recognition within your industry.
How else have you created epic content in the past? Share your thoughts and recommendations in the comment section below!


Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231741#ixzz2uMBtugCa