Pixel Qi in the limelight, Notion Ink speaks

Pixel Qi is showing off at Computex this week in Taipei, and Charbax just posted a detailed interview with Mary Lou Jepsen from the floor.   Look for the “Qi” button at 0:25, and serious geeking out on the physics and fab process starting at 5:00… and for the rest of the video! (For a quicker soundbite, he also posted this side-by-side iPad / iPhone / 3Qi comparison video yesterday.)

Notion Ink's Adam tablet, in portrait and landscape

Notion Ink's Adam tablet, with 3Qi screen

Pixel Qi are having a good quarter.  They are offering a variety of display options, including wide-view, anti-reflective coating, and a capacitive touchsreen. And they have started winning industry awards. More details, and a Notion Ink interview (they say their Adam tablet will release on time in a few months), after the jump.
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A great video from Yirkalla

Yirkalla is being well-covered by Australian media. TEN Digital devoted part of a weekend episode to the deployment, including this video from the classroom during the first day of the deployment. They catch a priceless expression on this child’s face 1:10 in, as he either learns to play Maze (as the shot suggests) or discovers Rick Astley for the first time.

Uruguay videos

I was looking through Uruguayan videos online for a recent full-length TV episode on Ceibal.  I didn’t find it, but here is the tireless Miguel Brechner presenting at TEDx in Buenos Aires last month – well worth a watch.  And there was a news episode on Argentine television late last year.

I also found this surprise: “Aprendiendo con Ceibal“, an unusual half-hour post-modern classroom experience…

(hat tip to Bob Hacker)

Dailymotion rolls out full support for open video; encodes 300,000 theora clips

Yesterday Sébastien Adgnot sent me a lovely message about Dailymotion’s drive to make Theora encodings available for all of their videos. Blizzard sums up the implications nicely:

Today Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, announced support for open video. They’ve put out a press release, a blog post on the new openvideo site as well as a demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5.  They are automatically transcoding all of the content that their Motion Makers and Official Users create and expect to have around 300,000 videos transcoded into the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats.  You can view the site they have up at openvideo.dailymotion.com.

This is fantastic news; it is a continuation of work DM started with a theora portal for a certain mean green machine, and means another 300,000 videos that will play natively on XOs out of the box.

PSNR comparisons of x264 v theora

PSNR comparisons of x264 v theora

More importantly, this is only the start of a wave of free codec adoption.  Theora has been making great technical strides at lower bitrates, with steady support from RedHat, Mozilla, and Wikimedia.  Expect similar updates to come over the summer, perhaps as early as June’s Open Video Conference in New York.

Congratulations to everyone at Dailymotion who helped make this milestone happen!

OLPC.tv aggregates 362+ OLPC related videos

OLPC.tv is a collection 362 videos about OLPC from around the world.  It has been updating since January 2007 by fan and volunteer Nicolas Charbonnier, of Denmark.  Now its efforts are being expanded to include other Sugar and 1:1 Computing videos.

If you have a video to suggest to add to the ones already posted, please send them to olpctv <at> laptop.org.  If you are at an OLPC event, school, or meetup, help take videos of the people there (with the consent of teachers and parents, of course).  You can also hack Record to let you capture videos of higher quality with your XO.