Tech Related

For a period of time I would buy new mobile phones every six months. This was to test new hardware, new operating systems and new versions. Recently mobile phone development has hit a development wall. http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/31/white-nexus-4-available/ of a phone is excellent, if that’s the reason you chose one phone or another. That’s not how I select my phones. Battery life is. For the last two years I have looked at mobile phones and battery life and it has not improved. I like to use my phones as GPS during via ferrata trips, walks and other outdoor activities. Within an hour you are usually down to half a battery or less and by the time you arrive home the phone is dead, unless you get an external battery to recharge the device. The fashion to develop phones that are thinner and thinner with bigger screens is only making things worse. I’d love to see manufacturers once again double phone size and triple battery capacity. I’d like something thick that I could use for a day in the mountains. Suunto have provided an alternative: This is a device that you wear as an ordinary watch on your wrist. It has an integrated GPS, pressure sensor and a rechargeable battery. In day to day use the battery loses around 1% of battery charge per day when in normal mode and around 3% per hour of exercise. It takes just a few seconds to get the watch in to activity tracking mode, to pause, tracking, or to stop tracking all together. The data it collects is synced with a computer very easily. If you spend a little extra money you can buy accessories for cycling, for heart rate monitoring, for cadence and more. Satellite acquisition is fast. Every time you sync the watch and charge it Geo-stationary satellite information is downloaded and synchronised with the watch. This speeds up the time it takes to have an accurate location. It takes around 4 seconds when near the location of synching and less than 30 seconds when 1-200 kilometers away. It’s fast. The beauty of such devices is that they encourage physical activity. Online you can share your tracks with friends and you can tailor apps to the types of sports you do or goals you set. There are apps for 10k runs, marathons and many more similar activities. Part of the purpose of this watch is to be a fitness trainer and app developers have made a variety of apps for interval training, distance etc. This watch has replaced my need for a mobile phone app to track the activities I do when outdoors. I can preserve battery life on the mobile phone until I am back on the home cellphone network or using the phone for in car navigation.

Sony Professional: NAB 2013 - New Camera systems for Live Sports from Sony Professional Europe on Vimeo.

With technological advancements and 4k cameras you can reduce the number of camera operators. Instead of having one central camera for the wide shot and several more to follow the action today’s technology allows for you to frame an HD signal in two 4k images. As a result rather than panning a camera physically you can pan a software camera instead. It means that one less person needs to be outdoors exposed to the weather. At the same time for conference coverage this is an interesting idea. The second interesting aspect is the sending of three signals from the venue via IP over a distance of 300km. Instead of sending an OB van to the venue you can vision mix from the studio remotely and send back the program. This broadens the market for live vision mixing. With a smaller budget you can provide some of the same services as would have been provided by an OB van, sat truck and multi person crew. It is broadening rather than undercutting the market.

Sony Professional: NAB 2013 - Introducing the new PMW-400 camcorder from Sony Professional Europe on Vimeo.

Two minutes in to this video there is a demonstration of the wireless options available with the PMW range of cameras. While filming you have remote monitoring. You can also send the data to your servers for editing.

An interesting look back in to the past. I remember seeing this conflict on television. I know people who covered the story and I’ve heard about how a colleague gave one person a gameboy when he left Sarajevo. That person called and asked about the individual and that’s how I knew of a personal story. One or two segments in this video show the tape to tape editing process. I learned how to edit this way but by the time I worked as an editor everything had moved to non linear editing systems. I’m sure this will bring back memories for a few people.

Vimeo On Demand: Sell your work, your way from Vimeo Staff on Vimeo.

Equipment is going down in price and information on how to produce good quality content is spreading. As a result of both these trends people like Vimeo and youtube can take advantage of the shift. Applying to work for mainstream media is no longer a must. What you do need to find are the right people with the right motivation to work alongside you. Once that is done the next steps are simpler.

Francine - Mar 0, 2013

Just had to let you know I probably wouldn’t have seen this post had it not been in my Google Reder. Though I don’t use it as much anymore to keep up with news sites, but it’s still the place I go to keep track of friends’ and acquaintances’ blogs and do targeted research. I, too, used Zite for a while, but haven’t in a while. Now I use Flipboard to bring together lots of different information sources and discover new content, and while it’s one of my favorite iPhone/iPad apps, there still isn’t something comparable I’ve found to use on my laptop. And, I still use Flipboard to read my Google Reader feeds on mobile.

Google Reader was a great tool because it made gathering and sharing content from specific sources intuitive and easy. It provided us with one place from which to do most things. Today Google have announced that they are pulling the plug on Google reader. In my eyes Google reader had become obsolete four years ago. That’s when I moved to services like Feedly, zite and others. Each of these services was more interesting because it took our feeds but used algorithms to make relevant content discovery faster and more intuitive. Feedly was fun for a while but eventually I stopped using it in favour of zite. Zite was excellent until they decided to downgrade the user experience to a pinterest like interface. I don’t want the kindergarten treatment when searching for information. I want headers, I want a line or two of content and I want to have a lot of information displayed in a small space. Zite fell out of the useful apps category and was deleted from the ipad and iphone as a result. The next project I’m looking at is Scoopinion. They have a plugin which tracks which news sources you visit and which articles you read. Based on your browising habits it recommends future articles. So far it estimates that I have spent 22hrs reading news over the past month or two with over 980 articles. By this logic it should be good at recommending stories that I would enjoy but it is too tabloid at the moment. This is probably due to the relatively small user base as this is a new project by developers in Finland. I love content aggregators that study my habits and give recommendations based on this. It makes the surfing experience more enjoyable. You also don’t suffer from RSS burn out.

Connecting (Full Film) from Bassett & Partners on Vimeo.

A look at interactive design and the future of tech

On Saturday I went canyoning, or as you Americans would call it Canyoneering and the adventure was fun. You suit up in 30°C heat and walk for fifteen minutes through a mountain path before going down to the river and jumping from pool to pool. The natural cooling effect of the water is welcome. As you go down the river so you get opportunities to jump from a variety of heights, from 7 meters to 11 meters. Land the wrong way and your palms may hurt. That’s not actually the point of this post. The point of this post is to speak about how much fun it is to spend your time going down a river in such a fun and relaxing manner. The drawback is that most cameras are not waterproof. The Nexus one mobile phone for example would be afraid. You may regret bringing it along. That’s why I have a new photo camera. It’s the Olympus Stylus Tough 8010. It’s a small drop proof waterproof camera rated to 10 meters below the surface. That means I can jump from 11 meters with it in my clothing and it should survive for me to take pictures of the next people jumping down. In a little over a week I’ll be playing with this camera during a rafting trip so I’ll upload the pictures at that point, if i don’t end up in the lake before then. I’ll leave you with a test gallery of pictures taken with the new camera. [flickr-gallery mode=“photoset” photoset=“72157624545521618”]

Google latitude is the perfect tool for anyone that works and has a life where logging into locations would be an unsightly thing to do. By that I mean that you can’t arrive at work and log into the location. It gives colleagues the impression you are not serious about your work. Now take this same situation in a social context. You go hiking and the people around you are not necessarily as passionate about technology. They’re walking around with paper maps after all. That’s where Google latitude comes into it’s own. Location is tracked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week every single day that your device is on. Why am I doing this? Am I not mad? Do I not have this location information to hide, and no shame? Well of course I have things to hide and shame but with this network only your closest friends can see where you are. And they only know your current location, not your previous locations. That’s where the service differs from foursquare, gowalla, yelp and all the others. Your location history is private. Only you have access to it. Then why use it in the first place? Well that’s simple. It’s a lifelog that’s not broadcast. You can keep track of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work and out socialising. Once a week I get to find out whether I was at work for more than fifty hours, whether I was at home for too many hours. More importantly i get to see whether I should not be a little more active in going out, from a personal life point of view. That’s where I’m lacking at the moment. Google latitude’s dashboard will help change that. Now, how could it improve? First of all automatic location check in. If I’m by starbucks in Geneva airport log me in if I’m seeing that network more than ten minutes. If I’m at the apple store for that amount of time log me in there. If I’m at a bar and I lose signal in that region due to poor network coverage then assume I’m in that bar. By being automatic and private location information could be quite a bit more interesting. More to the point that data is being collected anyway by mobile operators so why not take advantage of this? I believe this to be the future of mobile geo-location. With more android phones out there and more devices capable of multitasking this could easily become the norm.