The Weather Channel's new series, From the Edge With Peter Lik, will use the Media-Sync Platform to enable a second screen experience. 

The iPad app provides fans of the show the ability to interact with exclusive content in real time using your iPad. While you watch each episode you can map Peter’s path as he finds the "perfect shot”, see behind the scenes videos and photos and connect with other fans of the show on Facebook and Twitter.

The Media-Sync platform relies on audio watermarks already inserted into nearly every TV program in the U.S. as part of Nielsen's industry standard TV audience ratings service. 

Media-Sync is a joint venture between The Nielsen Company and Digimarc Corporation.

The Nielsen Company (Nielsen) embeds audio digital watermarks into the US TV broadcast workflow. These watermarks are detected by Nielsen households and aggregated into a rating for a particular program and market.

Advertisers have been seeking a similar system, a system that would provide a rating by commerical, for quite some time. At a recent conference Nielsen endorsed the Ad-ID standard, and announced plans to incorporate Ad-ID within its watermarking system to provide commercial ratings.

Read more at the NY Times blog

Ad-ID enables individual commercials to be tracked from the beginning to the end of their life. The Ad-ID standard, created in 2003, is managed by the ANA and the 4A's (formerly the American Association of Advertising Agencies).

Disney/ABC Television Group today announced the new "Grey's Anatomy" Sync App for iPad App, now available on the App store.

Powered by the Media-Sync Platform, the app provides fans of the show the ability to interact with exclusive content in real time using iPad.  The Media-Sync platform relies on audio watermarks already inserted into nearly every TV program in the U.S. as part of Nielsen's industry standard TV audience ratings service. 

View a video demonstration of the technlogy at work.

Media-Sync is a joint venture between The Nielsen Company and Digimarc Corporation.

When you have great images and artwork, you need to get it into the public domain in multiple ways, including public Flickr PhotoStreams.

Check out some amazing work by Julie Everhart; who has an impressive 125,000 plus views on Flickr! Julie uses Digimarc for Images to protect her work.

Editor's Note:  To see more of Julie's artwork visit her on her Redbubble site.

Our friends at ImageSpan have a great product, LicenseStream, and of course they blog about the latest LicenseStream news and offer tips and tricks to content owners.

The recently posted a two part series (can a series really be two parts?) on ways photographers can engage their clients during the holidays. 

My favorite tip is to reach out to potential partners who would be interested in bartering services. 

Adding my two cents to the their blog post, many web sites have remnant advertising inventory this time of year due to increased holiday traffic they are unable to sell. Instead of running low CPM "run of site" impressions they could be running ads to your storefront - in exchange for your images for use in future marketing efforts.

Facebook. Twitter. Picasa. Flickr. Blog. What else did I miss?

If you're anything like me, you have a variety of sites where to post your images. I post some images for friends on Facebook, then throw a few to the family over on Picasa, and then every once in a while tweet a couple more onto my personal blog to reach former colleagues (and provide fodder for the stalkers).

I recently stumbled across a site called Posterous which makes it easy to post your images online - to multiple sources - all via email. Simply email text, images, audio and video and route to the sites of your choosing. 

Over the next few weeks I'll do some testing with Digimarc for Images and share my results here.

Here’s a few quick digital image trends and tidbits live from the 6Sight conference in Monterey, California.

• In the United States, the total number of camera phones is expected to overtake the number of laptop personal computers next year
• Yesterday NTT Docomo introduced 19 new camera phone models in Japan, all with 8 megapixel cameras. Come on AT&T can you at least release one in the United States? 
  
• 14% of all handsets sold in the United States do not have a camera
• Biggest impact on cellular networks as far as data carrying capacity… wait for it… Pandora Radio

More to come later. For updated news visit 6Sight’s blog.  

In need of some inspiration? Doug Auld might be able to do the trick. Doug is a photographer, poet, writer and artist. His work at Paint-Tings is described as a "gift of life that moves the soul, tantalizes the spirit, captures memories and creates emotions for a lifetime."

Paint-Tings uses Digimarc for Images for copyright communication and tracking.

Do you post your family pictures to publicly available sites like Flickr, or do you create private photo albums?

I do both. And thanks to the Digimarc Search Service I can automatically track my digitally watermarked images on millions of sites across the public internet. 

Why track your images? If your images show up on another site, you should know about it to uncover misuse or licensing opportunities. And in my case, the last thing I want my wife to find out is that our images are appearing on sites like Akward Family Photos. Just because I wore a pink shirt and "MC Hammer Pants" doesn't mean everyone needs to know about it.

The first five people to email me can try out a new professional offering that includes the Digimarc Search Service. You can reach me via kevin.shields(at)digimarc(dot).com.

Thanks to Donnie Hoyl I'm on my way to PhotoShop "averageness."

Donnie has a series of five minute PhotoShop training videos including: You Suck At Photoshop Episode 1: Distort, Warp and Layer.  

Check it out at Babelgum.  (Some Sophomoric PG Language)