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Video Adverts On the Printed Page

Posted by timothy on from the for-those-not-following-alien-tech dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Prepare yourself. A staple of near-future sci-fi—magazine video ads—are now a thing of the present. And which high-tech magazine is leading the charge? Wired? Popular Mechanics? Nope. Successful Farming. The advertisement itself is for a pesticide that protects crops against nematodes. You can see a video of the video here."

8 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. further details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    some more links with additional information.

    this post includes info on pricing, the cost is $50/insert for a volume of 1,000
    http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspicks/2009/08/welcome-entertainment-weekly-r.html

    about halfway through there is footage of the raw board. looks like a standard small LCD, Li-Ion pack and logic board. and surprisingly a mini-usb for recharging
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3pI8F7ShSQ

  2. Didn't I see this before? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes. Yes I did.

  3. Re:What's in a name? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Seems appropriate since "successful" starts with s and "farming" starts with f.

  4. Another misleading summary... by dmitriy88 · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...you can hardly call Wired a 'magazine'

  5. Farmers are often on the cutting edge by Osty · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been saying it for some time now, but farmers have pretty much always been on the cutting edge of technology. The common view of farmers as slack-jawed yokels couldn't be any further from the truth. For thousands of years, most technology advances were the domain of farming. How do you think we can continue to feed the world's growing population and still have food surpluses that can be used for stuff like ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, plastics, etc.?

    Growing up as the son of a farmer, we were always playing around with new technology long before anyone else. Think your GPS is pretty sweet? Yeah, we had that in the early 90s for charting harvest yields (X bushels harvested at Y location with a relatively fine scale on the location == pretty yield maps). Wireless real-time stock quotes? We had that in the 80s for the futures markets. Self-driving vehicles? You've been able to buy tractors that would drive themselves in the fields for the past 15+ years, including collision avoidance (fields are not empty -- there are creeks, rocks, power lines, hills, etc that all need to be avoided or otherwise handled). The only thing surprising about this story is that this didn't happen 5 years ago.

    1. Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge by caseih · · Score: 2, Informative

      "Studies" apparently show lots of things. Most of the problems you mention are well-known, (even by us farmers), and are caused largely by unwise government subsidies. Obviously the farm bill is pushed by American farmers (of which I am not), and of course EU farmers, which is definitely short-sighted.

      As for precision fertilizer, you are quite mistaken. Farmers are jumping at the bit to do this sort of thing, but so far it's just not economical yet. I can easily meter an average fert rate across my 52' drill, but doing individual runs is more complicated than you think. But the technology is coming soon, and I will definitely be adopting it when it's feasible, technologically and economically. I've seen a fertilizer bill as high as $250,000 for 2500 acres. Don't you think I'd like to reduce that? The primary motivation isn't shiny things, but reducing costs which almost always equals reducing environmental footprint.

  6. Old, August 2009 we had almost the same article by Teferison · · Score: 2, Informative

    1 year ago we had almost the same article on slashdot, without calling it "near-future sci-fi". http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/08/20/202243/A-Video-Ad-In-a-Paper-Magazine

  7. Re:Mute button by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Informative

    The technology in use is Americhip's "Video in print". They are a touch light on technical detail; but it appears to be a full color LCD screen, most likely made possible by the economies of scale of the cellphone world, along with a driver board of some kind(unlike say, the fixed-segment, e-ink display that Esquire ran 100,000 of, which was pretty easy to control; but nearly worthless because it was fixed-segment and not even usefully so like the old LCD/LED alphanumeric displays).

    I'd assume that, for the relatively short runs they are doing, the included videos aren't stored in mask ROMS or PROMs, and that the driver is some comparatively sane fixed-function-video-decoder-plus-LCD-driver-and-enough-GPIO-for-a-few-buttons thing. Whether the whole thing kindly has labeled holes for the insertion of a JTAG header, or even a logic-level "rs-232" interface easily available, or whether it is some cryptographic lockdown horror is another question, though...