Common Paradox Tech Blog

Once deemed a novelty, 3D is now being heralded by some (like uber-mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg) as the future of the movie industry. It might also be the future of television, as companies like Imax, Discovery and Sony team up to bring 3D programming to the small screen.

The joint venture is expected to be officially announced sometime today. While all three companies will hold an equal stake in the channel, it will be distributed by Discovery Communications. According to The New York Times, the channel will showcase a mix of 3D content. (Imax and Discovery partnered together in the early days of HDTV.)

3D TV is expected to be a hot topic at CES this year, with companies lining up to announce their plans to bring the digital 3D experience to consumers’ homes. Last week, we reported on DirecTV’s plans to launch a 3D HDTV channel in March.

DirecTV and Discovery aren’t the only companies to announce engagement with 3D HDTV; earlier today ESPN announced its plans to launch a 3D channel in June. ESPN 3D is expected to showcase at least 85 live sporting events in its first year, kicking off (so to speak) with the World Cup soccer match on June 11. The station will go dark when there are no 3D events — much like ESPN’s initial HD coverage.

Of course, to enjoy these new 3D HDTV channels, consumers will need to own a 3D-capable HDTV set. Manufacturers will have plenty of sets on display. Like HDTV, the risk for 3D television is the relative expense of producing and broadcasting the content in relation to the number of homes with compatible devices installed.

However, the slow-as-molasses conversion to HDTV could actually benefit 3D TV technology, as consumers may decide to upgrade to a 3D-capable set when moving to HDTV or replacing an aging HD unit.

What do you think about 3D TV? Is this something you could see investing in?

Tags: 3D TV, 3dtv, discovery, ESPN, imax, sony, tv

If Discovery, Imax, and Sony have it their way, 3D television may actually go from novelty to reality in 2011. I can’t wait for the sensory overload of white sharks trying to eat the pants out of me.

The three are expected to announce the channel—which will feature a mix of 3D content starting in 2011—at CES. It will be 24 hours, which make it different from the ESPN 3D network, that only operates when they have sports events filmed in 3D. [NYT]

The following Top 5 iPhone Bluetooth Headsets guide is sponsored by the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store

The holidays are fast approaching and what a better last minute gift to give than a fancy new Bluetooth headset! With so many choices out there we figured many of you could use some help choosing the right headset. Today [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Top 5 iPhone Bluetooth Headsets

New Plugins

Thesis Style Box

Make Styled Note box, Alert box, Help box, Tip Box, Important Box in your posts using classes for Thesis Users.

Style CommentLuv

Style commentators last blog post as displayed by the CommentLuv plugin. This plugin is also compatible with Thesis.

Add Categories to Menu

If you’re using WordPress as a CMS, you may have set up static pages for both a front page (e.g. “Home”) and a page to list your latest blog posts (e.g. “Blog”). The plugin allows you to add categories as links in a submenu.

Taxonomy List Shortcode

The Taxonomy List Shortcode plugin adds a shortcode to your WordPress installation which enables you to display multiple unordered lists containing every term of a given taxonomy. The list can be displayed in one to 5 columns – custom styles are provided.

Revisionary

With Revisionary in place, the meaning of the “edit_others” capability shifts to grant revision submission rights if the owner lacks the corresponding “edit_published” / “edit_private” capability.

Web Worth Blog Value Calculator

Web Worth Blog Value Calculator is a plug-in that gives you a nice tidy widget to display your blog’s current estimated value in dollars. This information is displayed to you and your visitors to demonstrate just how much hard work you have put into your blog

Enable oEmbed Discovery

Website owners can add a bit of HTML to their head that says where their oEmbed provider is located. This allows consumers such as WordPress to embed things from their website without WordPress specifically knowing about their website before hand.

Updated Plugins

scbFramework

This is a plugin toolkit that helps developers write plugins faster. It consists of several classes which handle common tasks:

Tabbed Widgets

Tabbed interfaces are the most common on newspaper type website where they can save a lot of vertical space and make it look less cluttered.

Online Leaf

Provides an interface with Online Leaf, which helps to reduce the amount of energy required to browse the internet, by making websites greener.

WP Geo

Add geocoding and Google maps to your WordPress blog

All in One Webmaster

The plugin has option to add Google, Bing, Yahoo’s Webmaster and Analytics code. Single click sitemap submission to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.

Store Locator

The Google Maps Store Locator Plugin for WordPress empowers web developers & web site owners to easily manage and display any set of important stores, products, or other locations on their website in an easily searchable manner. Uses Google Maps.

Twitter Goodies

Twitter style Twitter Goodies Profile Widget + Twitter Goodies Search Widget + Twitter Integration (wp to twitter) plugin. All in One plugin for Twitter Goodies.

One of the most useful aspects of social media has been its power to help people discover people, content and ideas that they would have otherwise missed. Born from that shared desire for discovery has been an abundance of incredible web communities. Some, like Slashdot, focus on technology, while othersm such as Twitter, are mainstream open platforms for sharing.

Out of all of these communities, though, a few stand out due to their highly engaged web communities and their unique technology for finding the best of the web. Social discovery sites Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit are three of the best examples of what happens when technology meets community.

This week we are asking you, the readers, to answer a simple question: Which one of these social discovery sites is your favorite? Or perhaps more in the spirit of our weekly Web Faceoff series, which one would win in a death match? While Digg may be the largest of the three social media communities, StumbleUpon has had its victories and all three have extremely passionate communities that cannot be ignored.

As always, you have the final say. This week’s poll will close on Friday, December 18, at 12:00 p.m. PT. So make sure to cast your ballot, and then leave a comment telling us who commands your allegiance.

Who would win in a fight: Digg, StumbleUpon, or Reddit?(survey software)

Reviews: Digg, StumbleUpon, reddit.com

Tags: digg, poll, reddit, stumbleupon, web faceoff

ctmurray writes “Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days’ worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House’s opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery.” The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

likuidkewl writes “Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. ‘These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,’ said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Particle colliding is the new dog racing. Stephen Hawking bet against the LHC discovering the Higgs-Boson, and now you can get in on the action too.

Alexander Unzicker set up an options market for the LHC, where you can bet on the discovery of the Higgs Boson within a certain time frame. If you sincerely believe researchers either will or won’t find the “God Particle,” or if you just like making wild guesses on subjects in which you have little to no understanding, put your money where your mouth is. But make sure to factor futurebird destruction into your time frame.

CERN should probably take this to the next level. Set up a grandstand and hire a few bookies. Might be a good way to recoup the LHC’s $3 billion cost. [Bet on the Higgs via New Scientist]

Could be something, could be nothing, but an “iPhone3,1″ mysteriously popped up in the usage records of a Bay Area App Store developer. If you’ll remember, the “iPhone2,1″ turned out to be the 3GS.

The 3,1 phone was spotted in an analytics report from November for the iPhone app iBART.

This isn’t the first time something with that ID popped up on the rumor radar. In August, 3,1 was discovered hiding in iPhone firmware files. However, as MacRumors notes, this is the first time the marker’s been “seen” gallivanting out in public.

Also noteworthy is the timing of the discovery: In October 2008, Apple starting testing the 3GS in and around the San Francisco area. [MacRumors]