Display Moves To Thin Air With Russian Startup Displair: CES 2013 Video Interview

Imagine a world where you could just walk right up to something and right before your very eyes in the open air was a display. No monitor, no projector, just a display in the air. Now imagine if it was a multi-touch point display. You’re not far off from visualizing Russian startup Displairs, display technology.

As you can see in the video with our co-founder Nick Tippmann, the Displair unit is showing the hit game Fruit Ninja right in the middle of the air. The best part is you can actually use your hands to slice the fruit right in the middle of the air. It’s like some awesome step into Kinect or Nintendo Wii-verse technology.

The founders of this Russian startup see the potential in 4 dimensional game play. They also see the technologies potential in advertising and marketing. They had impressed some of the people from Coca Cola who stopped by their booth at CES’ Eureka Park last week.

Displair could display virtual Coca Cola water falls and create interactive games far beyond any consumers wildest dreams.

This is just the type of technology and startup that CEA was looking for when they set up Eureka Park last year. We saw some other wild tech this year as well like Tactus, a micro fluid technology that makes tactile keyboards just morph up from the screen of a smartphone or tablet device.

Check out our video interview below with Displair.

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17 Year Old Russian Entrepreneur Launches Startup: Hippflow

When you think of people to give you startup advice or to model your startup after you typically think of either high profile VCs or people who’ve had eight to nine figure exits. They must know what’s good for you because they’ve either invested in big deals or had a big deal themselves. That makes perfect sense.

Well a 17 year old entrepreneur by the name of Kirill Chekanov from Moscow has developed a startup called Hippflow which will hopefully help other startups.

How?

Chekanov tells us in the interview below that Hippflow will help entrepreneurs input and track resources, plan work, measure progress and celebrate milestone achievements.

Chekanov knew that for something like this to work he needed to go global from the beginning. He’s already inked partnerships in the US, England, Singapore and China. His latest partnership, is with Chinaaccelerator one of the largest startup accelerators in China.

Internally, his organizational startup has kept him focused and hitting his milestone goals while simultaneously finishing his last year in the Russian equivalent of high school.

Check out the rest of the interview with Chekanov below.

Microsoft Funds Russian Startup Pirate Pay To Shut Down Bit Torrents

Microsoft has invested in Russian startup Pirate Pay. Pirate Pay was designed to shut down torrent distribution of copyright protected works. This of course has the internet freedom fighters in a tiff, especially because Pirate Pay was able to attract such a significant investor.

According to this report from Torrent Freak, in early tests, Pirate Pay was able to shut down tens of thousands of downloads. Of course in the grand scheme of things, that’s not nearly as many as they would like.

“After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko says.

Bit torrent files are costing the movie and recording industry billions of dollars in revenue, despite the fact that physical cd and music media sales are still topping the download business.

Microsoft invested $100,000 into the company. With Microsoft’s investment Pirate Pay was able to continue working with Direktcya Kino to protect the film “Vysotsky. Thank God I’m Alive”. The film is distributed by Sony Pictures. In the case of this project 44,845 transfers were stopped.

Pirate Pay isn’t the first company that is “protecting” studios from torrent files. MediaDefender was actually the first company to take on the daunting task. MediaDefender has recently re-branded itself as “Peer Media”

Also, it appears that Pirate Pays main tactics aren’t original either. They won’t reveal how their technology actually works but Torrent Freak and many other websites and forums say that Pirate Pay floods the torrent sites with fake versions of the protected media, which discourages the downloading of the actual file. While it cuts back the illegal downloads, actual versions of the films actually make it to the torrent sites and then are easily identifiable as such.

The music industry actually started employing this tactic back in Napster’s heyday. While the folks running companies like Pirate Pay think they are solving the problem, they don’t realize that in most cases if a torrent file can’t be downloaded it doesn’t translate to going out to the store to buy the same title.

Source: TorrentFreak