massillonweb.com

We started our tour on the La Nouba stage, where I felt the presence of dozens of Olympic-caliber gymnasts all around me. The show’s operations production manager, Robert Shuck, explained that the stage has five lifts built into it, each one of which can rise out of the floor up to 16 feet.

Next up, we rode an elevator up to the theater’s top floor, the 9th, otherwise known as the “grid.”

In the 10 years since La Nouba opened, a lot has changed for Cirque du Soleil. It is now a much bigger organization; it has basically taken over Las Vegas–with five shows there already and at least two more in the works, as well as new resident shows planned for openings in Tokyo and Macao later this summer.

“This allows everyone to work a lot closer together,” Ramsey said.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

But that doesn’t mean La Nouba is a dud. It’s one of the most energetic Cirque shows around, and there is, in fact, plenty of tech to go around.

Down below, on the theater’s seventh floor, is where we finally encountered the show’s high technology.

The best part about that, other than getting to watch these incredibly gifted athletes perform without hundreds and hundreds of other people in the room, was getting to see them setting up the safety net the artists perform above. (See related video below)

Here is where most of the rigging is controlled, and this was Phillips’ domain. All around us were various pulley and counterweight systems, and not a lot of automation. But that’s not a problem for pulling off a great show, Phillips insisted.

La Nouba has just 32 crew members, while shows like Ka require more than 150.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

At this point, we headed back up into the theater where the show’s trapeze artists were about to begin their twice-weekly training exercises.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

While many of the La Nouba sets are lowered or raised from above the stage, some come from above the theater itself.

It takes the crew about 15 minutes to set up the net during the training sessions. But according to head rigger Dave Phillips, the same task takes just a couple of minutes during the actual show (he attributed that to the fact that it’s not the main crew that does the setup during training). Also, it was pretty clear that there was a much more relaxed mood going on at that point than during the show.

From left to right, La Nouba technical director Ken Ramsey, operations production manager Robert Shuck, and head rigger Dave Phillips.

“Everything went to hell,” Shuck said. “We (now have to) run wired headsets until the manufacturers” figure out a solution.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

The truth is that it doesn’t take that much technology to make a great Cirque show, as the folks who put together La Nouba, the Cirque’s show here, explained to me Tuesday.

Operations production manager Robert Shuck explains the show’s power track trampoline act. He said that unlike a previous form of trampoline flooring used in another Cirque show, power track provides more bounce for performers.

Of course, this is not the latest gear available to the theater industry, but pretty much the stuff La Nouba has been using since it opened. But according to Rob Pooley, head of operations for the show, that’s no big deal.

For a Cirque fan like me, this room was a special treat. Everywhere I looked were outfits exploding in reds and blues, gorgeous hats and much more.

To prove the point, Shuck got on a walkie-talkie and asked someone to demonstrate. Seconds later, one of the lifts began to push up out of the floor, and before I knew it, it was towering over Shuck.

But then again, even the circus needs office workers.

Here, Mary Amlund, the head of wardrobe, and her team of 12, put constant attention into making sure that the 67 performers in La Nouba always have perfect costumes.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

And these are no light platforms. According to Shuck, the one lift I got into requires a 14,000 pound counterweight to get its 30,000 pounds and up to 3,000 pounds of “live load,” otherwise known as performers, to rise.

A look from above at the Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba theater at the Downtown Disney resort in Orlando, Fla. La Nouba was the Cirque’s third permanent show and the first with its own freestanding building.

On the second day of my Road Trip 2008 through the South, I spent most of the morning on a behind-the-scenes tour of the La Nouba theater. For a Cirque junkie like me, this was a treat, even though it was the fifth Cirque show I’ve gotten such a tour of.

He said that Cirque management demanded the look, but it was no easy task coming up with a way to do it. Finally, though, he and his team settled on a motor system that wags the doors with what he called “rotisserie action” on the end.

Finally, the tour was over, and we emerged into an office space full of cubicles. It was hard to believe that this was still Cirque du Soleil.

And while we talked, some of the costume crew were hard at work, inspecting every inch of some of the outfits for tears, moving slowly and methodically as they did so.

And Phillips added, “It gives everyone an appreciation for what every department does.”

But to people who have worked in the company for years, like Ramsey, the low-key, small-crew nature of La Nouba is preferable to the highly structured huge and expensive shows the Cirque is creating these days.

“We just couldn’t get the right look for it” by using technology, Phillips said. “Sometimes the best solutions are the easiest and cheapest.”

He showed me Dynatrac, the software used to control the gear that runs the show’s many cues, and said it’s the same program he’s been using since the beginning. And, while it once took one of his engineers three eight-hour shifts to figure out how to do something that newer software used by the Ka crew could do in 30 minutes, he said there’s no need to change the system since La Nouba itself has barely changed in its ten years.

Another fairly low-tech solution Phillips explained was the method he and his crew used to design one of the show’s sets, a group of flapping doors that behave a bit like birds.

“Sometimes low tech is the best stuff,” he said, pointing out a chandelier hanging down from below the grid as an example. He said that a rigger takes the chandelier off its hook and drops it down into the theater. It is backed up by a bungie so it has a slow, smooth motion when it goes down.

ORLANDO, Fla.–If you’ve seen the Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas shows Ka, Love or O, you’ve probably been led to expect that every one of the company’s performances is full of wonderful technical achievements.

Our last stop was on the main floor of the theater, and it was a place I had not gotten to see in all my previous behind-the-scenes-at-the-Cirque visits: the costume room.

Amlund explained that there are people in the costume room from 6:30 a.m. until about 12:30 in the morning on show days doing laundry, inspecting costumes for holes and rips, mending, and making new outfits. She said the average costume lasts about six weeks, while some last up to six months.

“La Nouba is all about the artists,” said technical director Ken Ramsey, by way of explaining that I wouldn’t be seeing too much of the uber-tech behind some of the Vegas shows. “The technical side takes a very silent rest, as opposed to being the spectacle like in Ka and O.

Not to focus too much on what the lifts look like when they’re above the stage, we next went down into the theater’s lower levels where the lifts live when they’re not on display.

I had figured that was a Vegas problem, but Ramsey and Shuck explained that the same problem is creeping up in Orlando. That’s because HDTV stations are coming online nearby and crowding out the available frequency for the kinds of wireless communications the Cirque needs.

We started talking about the visit I took last summer to Ka and how I was told at the time that one of the biggest challenges facing the Vegas shows is the steady increase in the amount of interference that makes it hard for that show’s crew to communicate by wireless headsets.

In the costume room, staff members work from early in the morning until late at night making, mending, and inspecting the performers’ costumes. Here, red outfits hang on a rack.

When it launched in late 1998, La Nouba was just the third permanent Cirque show, after Mystere and O. But it was the first to get its own freestanding building. Today, 10 years later, the tall white structure stands out as a signal of world-class circus theater to anyone who passes by the Downtown Disney resort here.

Despite the fact that Juniper revenue exceeds $2 billion annually and the company’s market cap is nearly $13 billion, Kriens recognizes that Juniper just can’t match Cisco Systems’ product depth, global sales reach, and resources. Kriens still believes that Juniper can compete by following a simple formula: 1. Pick the technical battles it can win; 2. Stay ahead of the industry on innovation and performance; and 3. Acquire and/or partner to supplement Juniper’s value.

Kriens’ business strategy will be in play next week with a major announcement in New York. Nevertheless, Juniper made a move this week that flew under the radar: Juniper announced an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) relationship with start-up Q1 Labs to sell its security management software under a private label. To me, this move can bolster Juniper in three ways:

• 1. Q1 competes with Cisco MARS. Unlike other security management firms, Q1 is really focused on networking and security, and concentrates on competing with Cisco’s Monitoring, Analysis, and Response System (aka Cisco MARS). Juniper gains a product and partner built from the ground up to fight against its primary competitor. This should make Q1 popular with field sales very quickly.

Unlike other tech industry chief executives, Scott Kriens of Juniper Networks is refreshingly candid and pragmatic.

• 3. Juniper gains another enterprise hook. Security management is on fire right now as large organizations move to next-generation platforms. Yes, there are some strong competitors but Juniper/Q1 can hold its own. In the meantime, Juniper opens another door into the traditional Cisco base.

Cisco is Cisco and it will continue to win its fair share of the business regardless of what any competitor does. Still, enterprise companies are clamoring for a strong No. 2 networking vendor and Juniper realizes this. It sure looks like the company is making a series of aggressive moves, like the Q1 Labs deal, to capitalize on this opportunity.

• 2. Q1 complements the Juniper/NetScreen products. Juniper doesn’t have to duke it out with Cisco everywhere; it has security customers of its own. The security line it bought from NetScreen is a perfect security device complement to Q1 monitoring, management, and reporting. Likewise, Juniper can take the NetScreen line into the Q1 base. This is one of those cliche cases where 1+1=3.

The most frequently used apps on my
iPhone, bar none, are Kindle, eReader, and Stanza.

Let’s get some perspective. Publishers have vast libraries of old, forgotten books that are generating zero income, or close to it. Why can’t I buy e-book editions for 99 cents? Last I checked, some revenue was better than no revenue.

Case in point: I just read a glowing review of Jonathan Tropper’s “This is Where I Leave You.” I’m sold; I want it. But something’s amiss here: Amazon’s hardcover price is $15.57, while the Kindle edition sells for $14.01.

Amazon inexplicably charges nearly as much for the e-book edition as for the hardcover.

I will not buy “This is Where I Leave You” for $14.01. At $9.95, I have to think about it. For $2.99, publisher Dutton Adult, by way of Amazon or eReader or whoever, would already have my money. And probably a lot more, as I’d be snapping up books left and right.

Explain to me, then, why the e-book edition of “This is Where I Leave You” sells for $14.01. The $.01 suggests there must be some calculation at work, some formula you use to determine that Kindle and iPhone owners get to save all of a buck-fifty-six when they read green.

(Credit:
Amazon)

Dear e-book publishers: stop gouging us.

Apple figured out that 99 cents was the magic price point for songs and managed to strong-arm record labels into letting it sell at that point. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony–it’s time for you step up and convince book publishers to do likewise.

One final thought: at the same time you’re raking in newfound profits, publishers, you’ll be creating a more literate, well-read society. Not a bad perk, eh?

(By the way, bargain hunters, eReader.com sells “This is Where I Leave You” for $9.95–still disproportionately high, but more reasonable at least.)

This isn’t a new phenomenon. For as long as I’ve been reading them, e-books have cost nearly as much as their print siblings.

It’s time for that to change.

Why aren’t best sellers priced at, say, $2.99? That’s an impulse-buy price, one that would encourage readers to pony up instead of waiting weeks or months to check out the one print copy the library bought.

That’s the end of my diatribe. Over to you, readers. Would you buy more e-books if they cost just a buck or two? Would you be more likely to buy, say, a Kindle if cheap books were part of the deal? I eagerly await your thoughts on the subject.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

I also understand the concept of perceived value. If you make e-books cheap, that cheapens the value of books in general, right? No. Wrong. Hogwash. That’s 20th century thinking.

Now, I understand books cost money. There’s editing, publishing, and distribution. Paper, ink, trucks, gasoline. Storage, shipping, shelf space, sales staff. And the countless people involved in all those transactions.

Readers, it’s time for you to step up and letter-bomb both booksellers and publishers, to let them know you’ve got money to spend on books, but want fair prices.

E-books, on the other hand, consume zero trees. They weigh nothing, occupy no physical space, and don’t get shipped in the traditional sense. Middlemen are few and far between. So you’re left with, what, editing costs and the pittance you pay the authors?

But I’m getting increasingly frustrated with e-book prices, which rarely represent a savings over their print (aka dead-tree) counterparts.

Look, I’m your biggest fan. I’ve been reading digitally distributed fiction and non-fiction since the early days of the PalmPilot.

I’m no businessman (English major, natch), but even I understand the economics of volume. Want to sell more e-books? Lower the prices. Forget how things work in the physical world, where selling more books means more production, more shipping, more consumables. E-books require none of that. The only real “consumable” is bandwidth, and there’s no shortage of that.

“Another question is if Apple really wants to complicate the store known for its simplicity?

“The ‘all you can eat’ model, a replica of Nokia’s ‘comes with music’ deal with Universal Music last December, could provide the struggling recorded music industry with a much-needed fillip, and drive demand for a new generation of Apple’s hardware.

“Nokia is understood to be offering almost $80 per handset to music industry partners, to be divided according to their share of the market. However, Apple has so far offered only about $20 per device, two executives said. ‘It’s who blinks first, and whether or not anyone does blink,’ one executive said.”

If consumers who bought these ‘unlimited’ iPods have access to all the music for free, they’ll still have to pay for all video content presumably. Also, what happens if someone doesn’t want to go out and buy a new iPod to get this deal, do they opt-in by paying Apple $100? The FT report also suggests that a subscription package may only work with the iPhone and that such a deal would simply be added on to a user’s monthly AT&T bill–so what about those users without iPhones?”

If accurate, this would mark a big about-face for Steve Jobs, who previously has dismissed the rental music model. So far this evening, nobody’s been able to confirm the FT story. But the story has triggered a fury of interest over at Techmeme. For instance, VentureBeat’s MG Siegler raises an interesting question: with iPod sales said to be slowing down, what’s the sense of adding a premium to the products? What’s more, he asks:

“Apple would not comment on the plan, but executives familiar with the negotiations said they hinged on a dispute over the price the computer maker would be willing to pay for access to the labels’ libraries.

(Credit:
Apple)

Editors’ note, March 19, 7:45 AM PDT: News.com’s Greg Sandoval now has the lowdown from a source close to the deal. See “Apple could split device sales with music labels.”)

Is Apple ready to offer its smorgasbord of songs in a single package deal?

The company reportedly is still in discussions, according to sources speaking on background to the FT.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to answer some of these questions with more clarity in a few hours. Stay tuned.

The Financial Times may have nailed one hell of a scoop Tuesday evening. According to the paper, Apple is considering an all-you-can-eat plan in which users would receive free access to iTunes “in exchange for paying a premium for its
iPod and
iPhone devices.”

Note that this is a refurbished model; it comes with a 90-day warranty.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

The big benefit, of course, is that you can offload photos from your memory card when it gets full, then copy them over to your PC later. Like any good photo printer, the A716 also features card slots for all major memory-card types, support for PictBridge connections directly to cameras, and a good-sized LCD (2.5 inches) for reviewing photos. It can even connect to a TV for big-screen viewing.

CNET never reviewed it, but PC Magazine awarded the A716 an Editor’s Choice. I’ve had one for a couple years, and it’s a terrific little printer–though I do find the onscreen menus confusing. But for $46 (plus shipping), down from $250, who cares?

(Credit:
HP)

Remember that $40 HP photo printer from a couple months back? For an extra $5.99, you can get one that’s similar but way better: The HP A716 churns out snapshots as large as 5×7 (panoramas, too) and comes with 4 gigabytes of internal storage.

The popularity of free, anyone-can-edit Wikipedia has made academia’s battle against encyclopedia referencing–and the publishing industry’s efforts to sell reference material–tougher than ever. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which has embraced e-mail marketing to keep its hardback business in, well, business (I’ve received several promotional messages in the past few months), is now making Web moves to take back its authoritative presence in the industry.

The publisher’s Britannica WebShare initiative, launched April 13 with Twitter streaming of a daily topic, announced on Friday a service called Britannica Widgets, with which bloggers can “post an entire cluster of related Encyclopaedia Britannica articles” for free.

With the invention of the CD-ROM came Encarta, owned by Microsoft, which enabled easy cutting and pasting of encyclopedia content for students focused on speed and ease of research. It became a quick hit in school libraries yet the enemy of many teachers, who now had to add to their curriculum a lesson on the evils of cut-and-paste research, er, plagiarism.

To use the widgets, anyone can now “copy and paste the several lines of code associated with each widget as HTML into the appropriate place on your site,” according to a Britannica WebShare post. “Any readers who click on a link will get the entire Britannica article on the subject, even if access to the article normally requires a subscription. Really. Try it.”

Before Wikipedia, there was Britannica.

Britannica also is offering “people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, Webmasters, or writers,” free access to Britannica’s online content, with registration.

Currently posted Britannica widgets, such as the one here of the domestic cat, include colorful entries ranging from lizards to Nobel Prizes. Many more are expected in the coming weeks.

Really, young whippersnappers, having an organized stack of the neatly bound heavy encyclopedia volumes on library shelves was a status-making must in many U.S. households as recently as the 1990s.

Looks like it wasn’t the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle that was keeping potential customers away from high-definition video players after all.

The NPD Group released some of its retail sales tracking data Wednesday that showed sales of Blu-ray standalone players (not a
PlayStation 3, combo player, or PC with Blu-ray drive) had mostly decreased since the beginning of the year.

Standalone Blu-ray player unit sales in the U.S. decreased 40 percent from January to February and saw a very slight increase (2 percent) between February and March, according to NPD.

HD DVD players fared even worse–player unit sales dropped 13 percent from January to February, and 65 percent from February to March–which was expected. Toshiba stopped production of HD DVD units in February, and the format’s promotional group disbanded in March.

So what does this mean for Blu-ray player vendors? Why haven’t sales experienced any sort of substantial uptick without a competitor? Prices offer one clue. Blu-ray player prices were at their peak for the year in mid-March, around $400. During the holiday shopping season the average price had been closer to $300.

But more likely is what NPD’s high-def video analysts have been harping on for a while: that DVD is “good enough” for most consumers. And that the picture offered by a Blu-ray Disc and accompanying player doesn’t appear so overwhelmingly better than a standard DVD and an upconverting player that many consumers can’t justify the dramatically increased cost.

To that point, sales of significantly less expensive upconverting DVD players have actually increased 5 percent over the first quarter of 2008, compared with the same quarter a year ago. Standard DVD player sales dropped 39 percent over the same period.

Blu-ray player prices are going to have to drop dramatically, to around $200 probably, to make themselves more attractive to consumers outside of the early adopter/home theater enthusiast crowd. Sony, one of the largest producers of Blu-ray players, says $200 players aren’t likely until next year at the earliest.