Disney to Reap $1 Billion Online

The Walt Disney Co. expects to collect $1 billion in revenue from online content this fiscal year, a significant rise from estimates for fiscal 2007, CEO Robert Iger said Monday … Last month, Disney announced it had created a special studio to develop short-form dramatic and comedy series exclusively for broadcast on ABC.com and Google Inc.’s YouTube.

Full article: http://www.physorg.com/news124442746.html

Morris Miselowski’s thoughts:

On line content is the next big frontier and Disney has 1 billion reasons to believe this.

You Tube just announced that they were planning to provide a live stream service by the end of this year, which would allow us to broadcast our own content live to the Internet anywhere, anytime to an audience of billions. We know that people are now choosing to download shows and movies in preference to watching them as they are broadcast; and we know that there is an ever growing amount of devices on which and through which we can watch downloaded content.

One of the growing job categories of the future is definitely in the production, sourcing and dissemination of on line content.

Bringing Second Life To Life: Researchers Create Character With Reasoning Abilities of a Child

Troy, N.Y. – Today’s video games and online virtual worlds give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before. But despite having your hair, your height, and your hazel eyes, your avatar is still little more than just a pretty face.

A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is working to change that by engineering characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others. The characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behaviour of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world, according to the team.

Full article: http://www.physorg.com/news124368610.html

Morris Miselowski’s thoughts:

I know I keep going on about this, but this new study, other works being done that will allow avatars to move seamlessly between Internet sites  and our ever growing immersion in a synthetic on line world, all point to a rise of on line personal representation.

Within the next five years many of us will have a single avatar, just like we have a single mobile phone number, that will be our on line personal assistant and ambassador and that anthropomorphic avatar /figure will be a constantly evolving synthetic being that will learn about you as you interact with it and be able to, amongst many other things, conduct on line searches for you, communicate and answer rudimentary questions on your behalf and keep you up to date with your news, information and family events.