Higher expectations for digital media at NewFronts

FILE - This undated image released by Columbus 81 Productions shows comedians Jerry Seinfeld, left, and Michael Richards, former co-stars in the popular comedy "Seinfeld," in a scene from the finale of Seinfeld's web series, ?Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.? The Digital NewFronts will run Monday through Friday, as media companies like Google, Hulu and Vevo make presentations of their upcoming programming to advertisers in New York. Crackle, the Sony Pictures Entertainment digital network, is expected to promote the second season of Jerry Seinfeld?s Web series ?Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.? (AP Photo/Columbus 81 Productions)

FILE - This undated image released by Columbus 81 Productions shows comedians Jerry Seinfeld, left, and Michael Richards, former co-stars in the popular comedy "Seinfeld," in a scene from the finale of Seinfeld's web series, ?Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.? The Digital NewFronts will run Monday through Friday, as media companies like Google, Hulu and Vevo make presentations of their upcoming programming to advertisers in New York. Crackle, the Sony Pictures Entertainment digital network, is expected to promote the second season of Jerry Seinfeld?s Web series ?Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.? (AP Photo/Columbus 81 Productions)

NEW YORK (AP) ? Last year, the inaugural Digital NewFronts didn't skimp on the hype.

Google, Hulu, Yahoo and others made brash, glitzy presentations to advertisers trumpeting their ascendancy in a rapidly changing media landscape. Even Jay-Z dropped by.

There will be plenty of the same this week in New York at the second Digital NewFronts, the digital world's take on the annual TV "upfront" tradition. But ahead of this year's five-day-long overture to Madison Avenue, the talk is of both the great progress of digital entertainment and unrealized promises.

"It was absolutely a learning experience," Doug McVehil, senior vice president of content and programming for the music video destination Vevo, says about last year's NewFronts."I know there's some things we can do better this year both at the presentation itself and in terms of follow-up. But we're all fairly new at this. This is a young thing for the digital media industry."

In 12 months' time, the industry has come a long way. Netflix's first major original series, "House of Cards," proved that streaming video can compete with the most prestigious cable programs. Google's YouTube rolled out its 100-plus funded channels in a bid to bring higher quality videos (and thus advertisers) to its platform. One of the biggest TV stars, Jerry Seinfeld, launched a handsome Web series, "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee."

But some of the digital series touted last year have disappointed. Although Yahoo's "Bachelor"-spoof "Burning Love" has proved a modest hit, its Tom Hanks animated sci-fi series, "Electric City," didn't live up to its creator's reputation. While the top YouTube channels have grown considerably, several of its star-driven efforts have fizzled.

"Last year, there were some big promises about not only the quality but the volume of shows that people are going to make," says Eric Berger, executive vice president of digital networks for Sony Pictures TV, which owns the video site Crackle. "If you look back over the course of the year, as we talked to brands and agencies, there're some questions about quality and about the volume of things that were actually produced."

Crackle didn't participate in the NewFronts last year but will this year. It will be promoting, among other shows, an upcoming second season of Seinfeld's series.

Naturally, growing pains are inevitable, especially when so much is changing so fast. The wide array of NewFront presenters this year exhibits the evolving nature of media companies.

New presenters include The Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast, both venerable publishers known for their print products. But Conde Nast earlier this year launched online series slates for two of its magazines (GQ and Glamour), with plans to do the same for its other properties, including Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. The Journal, more than any other newspaper, has developed live video programing with its "WSJ Live" app.

"The Journal has really transformed itself since News Corp.'s acquisition into a complete content provider and not just business, finance and economics," says Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer for The Journal, explaining its entry to the NewFronts. "The world still needs to learn and understand about that and what we have to offer."

Yahoo will come into its presentation on the heels of acquiring the rights to archival clips to all 38 years of "Saturday Night Live." YouTube recently announced that in May it will begin a series of theme weeks to highlight its premium channels, starting with comedy. On Sunday night, Vevo will kick off the fourth year of its flagship program "Unstaged," a concert live stream. (Vampire Weekend will perform with Steve Buscemi directing the webcast.)

Performances will play a big part of Vevo's presentation, with appearances by Carly Rae Jepsen, Kendrick Lamar and Jessie Ware. But McVehil says at this year's NewFronts, brands want more than a good show.

"As we mature, I think it's going to be about people looking hard at real numbers and performance and judging companies based on that more than how sexy their presentation was," McVehil says.

Some companies are going it alone. NBCUniversal's digital division, having been a part of the NewFronts last year, held a separate event in New York last week, as did the gaming network Machinima. The talent agency CAA will preview its clients' digital projects this week, but not in an official NewFront.

Still, there are close connections for several of the 18 media companies in the NewFronts. Disney Interactive has several YouTube channels and in February partnered with Vevo to produce family friendly music content.

Ad agency Universal McCann predicted deals at the NewFronts could reach $1 billion. That's still a fraction of what broadcast upfront presentations pull in, but few don't expect digital media to continue to increase their share of the advertising pie.

"We're bigger this year, both in terms of the scope of the event and the amount of content," says Mark Walker, senior vice president of Disney Interactive Entertainment. "We had a few programs before and some speculation. Now, we have conclusively demonstrated that there's a robust audience demand for the kind of high quality video content that we're producing."

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-04-28-Digital%20NewFronts/id-7b16c6ad907f43458c4f8c847d28429d

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Mapping of cancer cell fuel pumps paves the way for new drugs

Apr. 28, 2013 ? For the first time, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have managed to obtain detailed images of the way in which the transport protein GLUT transports sugars into cells. Since tumours are highly dependent on the transportation of nutrients in order to be able to grow rapidly, the researchers are hoping that the study published in the scientific magazine Nature Structural & Molecular Biology will form the basis for new strategies to fight cancer cells.

In order to be able to fuel their rapid growth, cancer tumours depend on transporter proteins to work at high speed to introduce sugars and other nutrients that are required for the cell's metabolism. One possible treatment strategy would therefore be to block some of the transporters in the cell membrane which operate as fuel pumps, thus starving out and killing the cancer cells.

One important group of membrane transporters is the GLUT family, which introduces glucose and other sugars into the cell. Glucose is one of the most important energy sources for cancer cells and GLUT transporters have been shown to play a key role in tumour growth in many different types of cancer.

In the current study, researchers from Karolinska Institutet have performed a detailed study of the way in which suger transport is executed by the protein XylE, from the Escherichia colibacterium, whose function and structure is very similar to GLUT transporters in humans. For the first time, the researchers have described the way in which the protein's structure changes between two different conformations when it binds and transports a sugar molecule.

"In showing details of the molecular structure of the region that bind the sugar, our study opens up the opportunities to more efficiently develop new substances that may inhibit GLUT transporters," says P?r Nordlund at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, one of the researchers behind the study. "Information on the structure of the transport protein facilitates the development of better drugs in a shorter time. Such GLUT inhibitors could potentially be used to treat cancer in the future."

The study may be of significance not just to cancer research but also in the field of diabetes. GLUT plays a key role in diabetes since insulin works by activating the uptake of glucose from the blood by means of GLUT transporters in the cell membrane.

GLUT and the studied XylE transporter belong to the very large group of metabolite transporters called the Major Facilitator Superfamily (MFS), which is important in many diseases and for the uptake of medicines in cells.

"Many aspects concerning molecular mechanisms for the function of GLUT transporters are probably common to many members of the MFS family, which are involved in a broad spectrum of diseases in addition to cancer and diabetes," says P?r Nordlund.

As well as membrane transporters, which have undergone in-depth analysis in the current study, many different membrane proteins pass through the surface membrane of the cells. Their significance to the cell function and the development of drugs has been noted before, not least through the Nobel Prizes that were awarded to researchers who used mechanistic and structural studies to map the function of two other major membrane protein families, G-protein-coupled receptors and ion channels.

The current study has been financed by grants from the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Cancer Society, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and The Danish Council for Independent Research.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Karolinska Institutet, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Esben M Quistgaard, Christian L?w, Per Moberg, Lionel Tr?saugues, P?r Nordlund. Structural basis for substrate transport in the GLUT-homology family of monosaccharide transporters. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nsmb.2569

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/YpfcBJy_z0w/130428144853.htm

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Dave Gold, founder of 99 Cents Only Stores, dies (Providence Journal)

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Crowdsourcing in Manhunts Can Work

As authorities searched for suspects after the 15 April Boston Marathon bombing, social-media users conducted their own manhunt. Image: Flickr/Talk Radio News Service

The social news website Reddit was left red-faced last week after misidentifying suspects in the bombings at the Boston Marathon in Massachusetts, raising questions about whether crowdsourcing might do more harm than good in during a manhunt. But work by an international team of scientists suggests that crowdsourcing is a powerful tool in such situations, if used carefully.

Some social-networking enthusiasts contend that online tools such as Facebook or Reddit can harness the help of huge numbers of volunteers to assist in investigations. For example, photos of 'wanted' suspects can be spread rapidly among users on social networks. Critics point out, however, that by responding in haste or with misdirected zeal, users can make false accusations and point law-enforcement forces officers in the wrong direction, as seems to have happened in the Boston case.

Iyad Rahwan, a computer scientist at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, and his colleagues showed last year that networks such as Twitter and Facebook can be harnessed to find individuals across the globe from just their photos. Now, in a preprint posted on the online repository arXiv.org, the researchers explain what made that experiment successful. They say that participants responded to the urgency of the search not by sending out messages in an indiscriminate, blind panic, but by becoming more focused and directed about whom they contacted.

The original experiment by Rahwan and colleagues constituted their entry in the Tag Challenge, a competition staged by the US state department in 2012. The Tag Challenge required teams to find persons playing the role of jewel thieves in New York, Washington DC, London, Stockholm and Bratislava within 12 hours ? using only a mugshot of each target, released on the morning of the competition.

Rahwan and his team used crowdsourcing to find the targets, offering cash incentives to individuals for uploading photos of suspects to the web and for recruiting more searchers. Although they failed to locate the targets in London and Stockholm, the team won the competition.

Analysis of the information provided by participants now shows that communications such as tweets became more specific and directed towards other users in the target cities as the day of the competition approached. ?Despite increasing time pressure and its associated cognitive load, people actually became more selective in their recruitment of others,? says Rahwan.

?This makes good sense to me, and it's what I would have expected,? says Peter Dodds, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont in Burlington. In 2003, Dodds and his colleagues conducted a ?social-search? experiment to route e-mails to a few target people worldwide ? an electronic version of the ?small-world? experiment by psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967, in which he asked people to forward mail to reach individuals identified only by name, job and city ? and also found that successful searches are focused rather than scattershot.

Defence and security organizations have a growing interest in such studies. In 2009, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) staged the DARPA Network Challenge, in which competitors were to locate ten red weather balloons tethered at random locations across the United States. The winning team was led by Manuel Cebrian, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, who collaborated with Rahwan and his colleagues for the Tag Challenge. The MIT team found the red balloons in 9 hours by harnessing social media.

How does all this reflect on the search for the Boston bombers? Last week, Reddit users, acting on photographs of suspects posted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, collectively named several individuals who had nothing to do with the bombings.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=b81a44a98f7a051b3d458856b1ade2db

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China reports new bird flu case in Hunan province

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Saturday reported its first case of H7N9 bird flu in the southern province of Hunan, the latest sign the virus that has killed 23 people in the country is continuing to spread.

The official Xinhua news agency said the patient was a 64-year-old woman from Shaoyang city who developed a fever on April 14, four days after having contact with poultry. Her condition had improved with treatment, it added.

The flu was first detected in March. This week, the World Health Organization called the virus "one of the most lethal", and said it is more easily transmitted than an earlier strain that has killed hundreds around the world since 2003.

None of the 41 people who had come into contact with the newly-confirmed Hunan patient, identified only by the surname Guan, had shown symptoms, Xinhua said.

A 54-year-old man who fell ill in Jiangxi province was also being treated in Hunan, where he was diagnosed with H7N9, Xinhua said.

The Hunan cases come a day after the eastern province of Fujian reported its first case and during the same week that a man in Taiwan become the first case of the flu outside mainland China. He caught the flu while travelling in China.

Chinese scientists confirmed on Thursday that chickens had transmitted the flu to humans.

(Reporting by John Ruwitch; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-reports-bird-flu-case-hunan-province-115627332.html

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Indian spy on death row hurt in Pakistan prison

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) ? A top Pakistani prison official says an Indian spy on death row was critically injured when he was attacked with a brick inside a prison in the eastern city of Lahore.

Farooq Nazir said Friday that Sarabjit Singh sustained a serious head injury when he was attacked by two other prisoners on Friday at Kot Lakhpat jail. Nazir said Singh was moved to hospital and was out of danger.

Singh was arrested in 1990 for his role in series of bombings in Lahore and Faisalabad that killed 14 people.

He was convicted of spying and carrying out the bomb blasts and sentenced to death in 1991. The sentence was later upheld by Pakistani superior courts.

Former military ruler Pervez Musharraf rejected his mercy petition in 2008.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/indian-spy-death-row-hurt-pakistan-prison-163426222.html

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Rep. Hank Johnson on helium debate: 'Imagine a world without balloons' (VIDEO) (Washington Post)

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