It looks as though the tides of fortune may be shifting, at least for the present, for the Internet’s most popular video-sharing portal. Coming just days on the heels of a mammoth lawsuit by media conglomerate Viacom, YouTube has announced that it has inked a deal with CBS to carry clips and highlights of the NCAA “March Madness” tournament lineup.

Although financial details of the deal haven’t been released, it will likely be a lucrative slam-dunk for the beleagured YouTube, the defendant in a billion-dollar lawsuit launched by Viacom in the wake of it’s copyright infringement complaint.

Viacom is seeking more than one billion in damages from YouTube, accusing it and its parent company Google of “massive intentional copyright infringement” by allegedly continuing to allow circulation of more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom content.

Some industry analysts have expressed concerns that a court victory by Viacom could damage the very underpinnings of Internet business models by directly challenging basic tenets of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The 1998 DMCA has served to limit the liability of Internet companies that make copyrighted material available online.

In a bid to ramp up aircraft safety and traffic efficiency, Charles de Gaulle International Airport is slated to install a system that uses infrared laser beams to detect and analyze violent air currents generated by departing aircraft.

The WindTrace system is built by Lockheed Martin, and uses LIDAR (Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging) technology to detect and measure wake vortices, the violent rotating air currents that trail from the wingtips of large aircraft.

Lockheed Martin’s system uses bursts of infrared laser energy to illuminate naturally occurring particles suspended in the air over airport runways. It then examines the light that is reflected back, looking for patterns that suggest the presence of wake turbulence.

A wake vortex resembles a small tornado that spins horizontally off the tip of an aircraft’s wing as it slices through the air. Velocities exceeding 200 km per hour in the wake vortices of large aircraft are common, and can cause dangerous turbulence to aircraft that encounter them.

Wake turbulence was implicated as a contributing factor in the crash of American Airlines flight 587 in November of 2001. The Airbus A300 fell from the sky just minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, crashing into a neighborhood in Queens after the structural failure of its tail section. 265 people died, including 5 on the ground.

EUROCONTROL, the European authority responsible for safety of air navigation, has already successfully deployed WindTracer at Frankfurt International Airport, and has plans for further installations at other locations.

In addition to enhancing safety, monitoring wake turbulence also increases airport efficiency, by helping controllers to safely gauge minimum separation between departing aircraft.

Photo: Lockheed Martin

Siemens Building Technologies has developed a smart security camera technology that will hopefully be the ideal partner for image-overloaded security guards.

The Sistore CS EDX system uses advanced algorithms to digitize and analyze images it receives from remote cameras via an internet or intranet platform. The algorithms enable the Sistore hardware to “learn” the routine background images of the areas it monitors. For example, a system camera monitoring a storage yard full of vehicles will observe and store information about what it is seeing, including the size of the objects in its field of view and the parameters of object movement that normally occur.

If an intruder jumps the fence and enters the monitored area, Sistore will make the determination that the intruder is of a different size than the objects it normally “sees”, and that its movement is outside of routine parameters. The system will sound an alarm, then use its additional cameras to track and record the intruder.

Sistore could be the answer to the problem of information overload, that is regularly experienced by security guards who man video surveillance stations. Constantly bombarded by the influx of images supplied by several monitors at a time, many guards are simply overwhelmed by the flood of images. As a result, studies have shown that the guards can miss nearly half of the activity in a scene after 12 minutes of watching, and 95 percent of activity after 22 minutes of viewing two screens with switched inputs.

The system is flexible in that any number of cameras can be installed within its network architecture, and offers adjustable parameters for the size and speed of objects within its viewing area.

Sistore will make its debut at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, where 1300 cameras will watch over the events and provide a deterrent to criminals.

Shared media within the context of Web 2.0 is ever-widening in its spectrum, so one could describe the current twist on Internet radio as the next evolution. It’s not the same old radio stations providing streaming audio on the web – it’s your school pals or your next-door neighbor, sitting in the DJ chair and bringing their music mixes to the world.

Welcome to Mercora, where their mission is to build the world’s largest music network – where users catalog and share their own unique collections of tunes. And stream them live on the Net, 24/7. The dream of becoming a DJ is now available to the masses.

Mercora, and its sister site Lala, have cleared the road of the potential legal hassles of broadcasting copyrighted material over the Net. They both pay royalties for each song listeners tune into, allowing DJ wannabe’s download access to libraries of as many as four million tunes Mercora has licensed so far.

The user interface looks remarkably like iTunes, with a three-pane display at the top of the screen where you can select your music library according to artist, album or genre. A large central pane shows each track included in the selected library, and a left-hand sidebar displays playlists and the status of up to four “channels” that can be Webcast simultaneously.

The real fun is dragging and dropping selections from the library into each channel, where they enter a qeue for playback on your Mercora “station”. There’s even a page that lists the popularity of each DJ on the network according to listening audience.

Your path to stardom awaits.

For many of us, the only affordable entry into the much-hyped space tourism experience will be to ride into space in a tiny canister – posthumously. The prospect of a space burial is appealing to many space enthusiasts and geeks of just about every color, but even this final ride can be prohibitively expensive – and you can’t even request a window seat.

Today, the nascent Canadian aerospace industry is offering a new entry in the space memorial business. Richard Graf, of Columbiad Launch Services claims his method is the cheaper alternative. It is, at least, definitely different. Instead of blasting the dearly departed to sub-orbital altitudes aboard a commercial launch vehicle, Columbiad will use a scaled-down supergun to give customers their last ride. Instead of just a few grams of ashes, Columbiad says it will launch the entire cremains of the deceased.

Columbiad is planning to offer memorial moonshots sometime soon, too, and even plans to offer launch services for commercial satellites.

The large artillery that Columbiad will use to hoist the payload into orbit, called the Industrial Sounding System (ISS), is portable and will provide launch services from any road-accessible area. Columbiad says that an economical “glide probe” will carry cremains to a maximum apogee of 100 km, but customers will also have the option of choosing a rocket-assisted vehicle to achieve altitudes of 250 km or more.

If you really want to know just how much saturated fat is in that hamburger you just fast-tracked at the drive-through, just snap it with your cell phone.

That’s what they’re doing in the mecca of high-tech, Japan, where McDonalds now serves up some of their fast food items with QR codes. QR (quick-read) codes were originally developed in Japan and popularized in 1994 as a way to improve upon bar code technology. Originally used in the automotive parts industry, the codes consist of optical patterns that display scanner-readable data along both the x and y axis (horizontal and vertical) of the image. Since the bar codes of yesteryear only diplayed data along the horizontal axis, the QR code became a much larger storehouse of data, easily interpreted by optical scanner technology.

The Japanese, famous for melding technology and convenience, decided to add QR code scanning capabilities to newer cell phones. The user simply grabs an image of the code with the phone’s camera, and the data held in the code is translated.

At Mcdonald’s, the customer scans QR codes emblazoned on a variety of their menu items, and is directed to a URL that displays a vast array of nutritional information, including fats, carbs, sodium, and protein content. Allergy warnings are also available, and the nutritional info is available for individual items or meal features.

The development of new optical polymers has led to the creation of an all-optical modulator that will serve as the foundation for ultra-miniature, high-speed chipsets powered by light, say researchers at the California Institute of Technology.

Michael Hochberg and Tom Baehr-Jones at CalTech have created a new silicon waveguide that can manipulate a beam of light and produce an optical stream of digital information. This silicon waveguide could be the basis for the creation of optical logic gates, that will handle computations at blistering speeds of up to 100 times faster than electron-based logic circuits.

The silicon waveguide splits a light beam into two parts, the input or “gate” beam and the source beam. The routing of the source beam is controlled by the gate beam, creating a light-powered “circuit” that can process information in much the same fashion as electron-based logic gates.

Branson unveils part of spacecraft, seeks to popularize space travel from PhysOrg.com

Billionaire adventurer Richard Branson unveiled part of his Virgin Galactic spacecraft, expressing hope that millions will be able to travel into space in coming decades and vowing to do his part to make that a reality.

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In a bid to claim its share of the search engine and related marketing turf, Microsoft has launched the first salvo in what could be a long battle against the current industry giants, Google, Inc and Yahoo, Inc.

Although Live Search has been available for some time now in the form of a beta release, it has now officially launched as the latest massive attempt to claim its share of the 975 million to 1.3 billion U.S. search queries per month. Microsoft fully realizes the revenue potential of this market, and has big plans for the Live brand. Christopher Payne, the Corporate Vice President of Live Search at Microsoft, revealed that Live Search will undergo a series of refinements to make it as user-friendly as possible. “This is just the beginning,” Payne said. “We look forward to continued investment in search to deliver services that bring new levels of control and personalization to the Web experience.”

Indeed, one of the most touted features of Live Search is its level of customization. Users can create their own homepage, using macros to define the content they find most useful, from financial and entertainment news to RSS feeds and image searches.

Web searches on Live are executed quickly and efficiently, rendering a generous supply of relevent content. Local content is delivered somewhat more slowly, but the Bird’s Eye View map details are crisp and comprehensive, and reminiscent of Streets and Trips.

It appears that Microsoft might become a worthy adversary in the engine landscape, but it has a long way to go before it can nip at the heels of industry behemoth, Google, Inc, whose expansion has been healthy enough to warrant opening new digs in the heart of New York City, at 111 Eight Avenue. Last year, Google earned $3.6 billion profit on $8.5 billion in revenue, in additon to raising $4 billion in cash on a secondary stock sale.

That’s a very large mountain, and Microsoft will have to push hard to move it.

Very hard.