Kevin Clarke has joined Flipside Editorial, San Francisco, as senior animator. Already at his new roost, he has worked on several spots, including Clorox, Quicken.com and Disney Interactive.
Clarke comes to Flipside from Lunarfish, San Francisco, where he worked on animation projects for The Game Show Network as well as numerous corporate IDs.
Clarke began his digital career as an independent artisan working in emerging media, including 2-D and 3-D imaging for CD-ROM games such as Broderbunds The Last Express. Clarke ventured into video and broadcast work in 97 with Digital Consortium, San Francisco, where he worked on projects including video game cinematics as well as legal animation used in the first state case (Florida) to prosecute the tobacco industry. His grasp of the latest technological advances was brought to the fore at Imagination Plantation, San Francisco (which later became part of the Wild Brain animation studio, also in San Francisco). There he was lead animator on the Starship Troopers CD-ROM for Micropros and several installations in Berkeley Systems You Dont Know Jack game series.
While at Imagination Plantation, Clarke was also instrumental in beta testing and bringing to market Alias Wavefronts Maya, one of the newest and most advanced of the 3-D software products in use today.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More