Tech News: GigPan FanCam, Airline fare deals

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September 13, 2011, 8:37 am

The next time you head out to the concert event of the year make sure you're well-coiffed and ready for your close-up. Interactive panoramic images that can capture an entire crowd of people in incredibly fine detail have become the new standard in digital event keepsakes.

U2 captured each crowd on the U.S. leg of its U2 360-degree tour this year, including the mammoth show at Spartan Stadium in East Lansing, Mich., using a system called the GigaPixel FanCam. After the concert fans can head to the Web and zoom in on that night's GigaPan and play a bit of Where's Waldo, finding themselves and adding their name to the image.

The interactive images work by stitching together hundreds of photos into one sweeping 360-degree look at the crowd. Each GigaPan contains billions of pixels. KINK was the first to use the technology here in the Portland area for the Blues Festival, since it is a Portland based business. GigaPan was developed as partnership between Carnegie mellon nasa and google. Read more

Kayak features Hacker Fares
Savvy travelers have long known they can mix and match two one-way tickets from different airlines and pair them into a round-trip ticket to get a better deal. But now Kayak has automated the online process by featuring Hacker Fares.

A search for a round-trip Boston-to-Seattle itinerary on Kayak.com in early October, for example, returned a Hacker Fare with a US Airways flight to Seattle and a JetBlue return flight for $353, shaving $11 off a traditional, one-airline itinerary.

Kayak says it grabs available one-way fares from a variety of sources, including airlines and online travel agency sites. Kayak displays these one-way fares in a round-trip itinerary as a Hacker Fare when it produces the lowest fare for a city pair in general or the cheapest in a time slot, adds an airline or saves time.

The attention-getting Hacker Fare name is meant to conjure images of a "hacker" manually cobbling together two one-way fares into an unorthodox itinerary and beating the airlines at their own pricing game.

Although Kayak drew attention with its recent introduction of Hacker Fares, the U.K.-based Skyscanner has been offering a similar service on its U.S. domain, Skyscanner.com, since its debut in 2009.

Yet another new reality series
"H8R" a new reality series from the producers of “Extra” and “The Bachelor,” is first and foremost entertainment. But the show, the title of which is a play on the word “hater,” is also a reaction to the bile, often anonymous, that cascades through the Internet.

“Haters are hiders,” said Lisa Gregorisch-Dempsey, one of the show’s creators. “It’s easier to trash talk when you don’t have to look people in the eye. We wanted to see if these people would continue to rage if they had the chance to look celebs in the face and hear how hurtful this stuff can be.”

“H8R” adds to a pop-cultural backlash against vitriol on sites like Facebook, where a page titled “I Hate Lil Wayne!,” referring to that diminutive rapper, has more than 17,750 fans. MTV has “If You Really Knew Me” and “Bully Beatdown,” while Fox’s “Glee” regularly explores the subject. On the much more serious side, “The Bully Project,” a documentary about extreme schoolyard teasing, will arrive in theaters in March, courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

And the message is all over the music landscape, where the likes of Lady Gaga and B.o.B. have recorded songs about irrational hate.

The message of “H8R,” said Mark Pedowitz, president of the CW network, is this: “Think before you type and don’t believe everything you read on a blog.”

Ms. Gregorisch-Dempsey, also the senior executive producer of “Extra,” sees a ratings opportunity. But part of her interest is personal. She has a gay nephew who she says has had a difficult time, and one of her cousins is Glenn Berman, the New Jersey judge presiding over the trial of Dharun Ravi, who is accused of secretly recording his Rutgers University roommate having an intimate encounter with another man and streaming the images online. The roommate committed suicide a few days later.

“H8R,” set to have its premiere on Wednesday night, has a simple construct that is a twist on “Punk’d,” the former MTV series that played pranks on stars. In each half-hour episode of “H8R” two celebrities or athletes — typically ones who have suffered their share of negative tabloid attention — are shown a video of an everyday person ranting about why they don’t like them. In the first installment Snooki of “Jersey Shore” fame learns that Nick Petrillo of Long Beach, Calif., loathes her because he thinks that she is nothing but a “drunken donkey.”