All Ads, All the Time
TV commercials are made in a frenzy of quick deals with impossible deadlines. "Your creative director might hear of a new spot, and suddenly he wants to figure out how to get a tape, who did the work, and how to start bidding for the director," says Pomegranit's Jan Frei.
To keep up with plugged-in pitch pros, Advertising Age and Intel have devised a satellite newsfeed called the Ad Age Edge. Using a dedicated PC terminal, the service delivers late-breaking industry reports and flawless full-motion video of the latest TV ads.
Currently, agencies pay clipping services hundreds of dollars in search-and-dub fees for VHS copies of ads. The new service, with a yearly price tag starting at $17,500, will keep an inventory of spots for 30 days, as well as commentary from the magazine's editors and background on the ad's creation. Like Bloomberg's service, the Ad Age Edge is a pricey status symbol that offers highly refined data to executives.
Release: March. Ad Age Group: www.adage.com.
Dwarf Drive
At first you'll fixate on the tiny proportions of IBM's Microdrive. With a mechanism similar to the disk drive inside your computer, this dollhouse version has a metal arm that swings across a lilliputian magnetic plate.
Sure, the concept of a 1-inch, 340-Mbyte disk drive is impressive, but the capabilities are what matter. Canon's PowerShot Pro70 digital camera, one of the first applications of the IBM tech, dares photographers to shoot high-resolution digital pics all day without running out of storage space. Traditional flash-memory cards get very expensive as you move up in capacity. The Microdrive, on the other hand, promises to cost less. And since its tiny plate spins at 4,500 rpm, it can access data much faster.
Release: March. Canon: www.canon.com.
Studio in a Box - Really
Digital videocameras have all the hallmarks of a great gadget - they're small, they're shiny, and they shoot beautiful footage. But editing footage on a home PC - the advantage I've heard every DV camcorder maker tout - has been accompanied by much knocking on wood. Until now.
STB's DesktopVCR, a $300 videoboard, converts digital video into MPEG2 format, the standard used for ultraclear DVD movies and satellite TV. Now you can make a video of your dog's backyard antics, connect your camcorder to your firewire port, and - voilà! - the board compresses the footage into MPEG2. From there, you can edit the movie with the bundled Asymetrix Digital Video Producer software, applying scene transitions such as wipes, fades, and other effects. And if you have a DVD burner, you can even make a hard copy of Fido's Greatest Tricks. Home movies made this way will work in any DVD player.
The product name refers to the device's onboard television tuner, which saves favorite TV shows on a hard drive. But to me, the board's most compelling feature is its power to convert multiple formats into a digital lingua franca. During the next few months, several boards will hit the market, all powered by the same new C-Cube chip that drives the DesktopVCR. Later products will even include a firewire port mounted on the board. But STB's package looks like a promising first entry and will likely continue to be the least expensive MPEG2 card available.
Release: spring. STB: www.stb.com.
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