“By bridging the gap between privy full-featured camcorders and single-use cameras, Glide makes it easy to capture high-quality footage anywhere from a wedding to a rafting trip and bring it home for sharing on standard DVDs.” Yanko

Hitachi’s new DZ-BD7H will record 1920×1080 video to either Blu-ray discs or a built-in 30GB hard drive. That’s about four hours of 1920×1080 video, or eight hours of 1440×1080 footage onto the drive. The dubbing feature will let’s you do internal copying of HD video from the hard drive to a Blu-ray disc at 2X speed. It also doubles as a regular photo camera with a resolution of 4.32-megapixels, and SD card slot for storage. Hitachi

Press Release via Engadget

A speculative report has been published by The Financial Times, with some leaked juice just before Apple’s WWDC keynote that’s happening later today.

They claim that “Apple is in advanced talks with Hollywood’s largest movie studios about launching an online film rental service…” Also, “A film would cost $2.99 for a 30-day rental. Its digital rights-management software would allow films to be moved from a computer to at least one other device such as the video iPod or iPhone…” And Apple is supposedly aimng for a Fall launch of this service.

Many people are of the opinion that traffic wardens are sub-human, but now they’re becoming trans-human with the addition of head mounted video cameras. Traffic wardens in Salford will be getting the cameras to help them in their new role of dishing out anti social behaviour orders for violations like littering, fly posting, graffiti and allowing dogs to foul the pavement. :: BBC

The Pirate Party, known as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker,”  has made the news yet again (and probably won’t stop). They’re doing it video style this time with the all new thevideobay.org (nothing here yet, just very secretive). And Mashable says what they’re doing “is essentially in the process of making a YouTube competitor.” There is no word on a launch date, but hopefully it’s sometime in the near future.

Vending machines in Japan will soon offer free coffee in return for watching 30 second adverts. Apex Corps run 35,000 vending machines across Japan, some of which will be outfitted to play an advertisement during the 30 seconds it takes to make the drink. Not only will customers have to watch that one, but the cup will also feature an advert too.

‘We will select the locations of vending machines which would best suit the customers targeted by advertisers,’ said an Apex official. I wouldn’t be sure where to place these, there seems to be a paradox with this kind of advertising which should also worry the marketing agencies placing ads with Apex.

The more affluent an area, the more disposable income is available, which is obviously a good point for advertisers. However, the more affluent an area, the less likely people are to watch ads in order to get a free cup of coffee that would normally only cost 60 cents. If there is an option; to get a free drink or to avoid the advert, then I see a problem. Perhaps initially the novelty will be enough to encourage lots of users, but I would personally rather pay for my coffee, especially considering that vending machine coffee normally tastes of mud.

Read [Kahleej Times]

Matthew Sparkes is a contributing author for MoT.