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Amersports and Sports tracker
Today Amer Sports announced that it has bought Sports tracker. Sports Tracker is an application that I have been using since I had the Nokia N95 8GB. I used it on symbian, iOS and Android devices over the years. What I love about this app is the way it displays information about the work out. It gives you several screens while you are exercising with the option to select which information you want to see most.
Once you arrive home and synchronise the workout with the web interface you can see the information displayed above. You can choose whether there is a topographic map, a normal map or satellite imagery. It is simple and intuitive to read.
Suunto make devices that I like using. I have used the Suunto D9 diving computer, the Suunto D4i diving computer, the Suunto Ambit 2 and the Suunto Ambit3. Suunto dive computers are small diving computers that you can wear in day to day life. When you are passionate about diving this is nice.
The Suunto Ambit family are more interesting for people who do land based sports. I used the Suunto Ambit 2 and 3 when doing via ferrata, hiking, cycling and other sports. The advantage of these fitness watches is that they have long battery life. This means that you can be active for two or three days before worrying about the battery dying. In this respect they are far better than mobile phones for fitness activity tracking.
Suunto products and Sports tracker do not communicate natively. Suunto products synchronise with movescount. From movescount you need to export the GPX workout files and import them to Sports tracker. I would like to see Suunto devices communicate directly with Sports tracker. In my eyes the best option would have been for Sports tracker to buy movescount and for them to take over the web interface for Suunto. They both provide interesting web interfaces and combining the two would have been mutually beneficial.
Time will show whether Amer Sports with links to sports tracker, precor and Suunto will come out with an interesting amalgamation of the three products/services. I look forward to finding out.
Video piracy in the 21st century
A few days ago I was watching a Magnum PI episode where Higgins had a film camera pointed at the television screen to record a game of snooker broadcast from “half way around the world” by satellite.  Today I noticed this article speaking of the way in which twitter’s Periscope app and Meerkat were used to pirate a fight.
Piracy is nothing new but the simplicity with which people can pirate and share content has evolved. Piracy required rolls of films at first. These rolls had to be developed and then copies had to be made. This could take several days. VHS came along and made it easier. With several VHS decks you could make several copies at once. Steve Jobs is well known for the boot leg tapes he had of music concerts. My generation streamed live music concerts using mobile phones. Football enthusiasts used satellite receivers and streaming software to re-distribute live football matches years ago. This is true both for european Football and American football.
The live streaming of broadcast content is now so simple that multiple people, using social media, redistribute content as it happens. There is no lag time. There is no exclusivity possible. PeriscopeTV and Meerkat have made it very simple to share live events circumventing the gate keepers.
Gate keepers provide the highest audio and video quality possible for their customers and for this reason they are safe for now. The pirated copy has low video and audio quality and is filmed by a mobile phone camera. Social networks such as Twitter and sporting organisations will need to strengthen their collaboration. Both of them can and will benefit from joining forces. If PeriscopeTV and Meerkat both get paid by the Fight promoters to carry the signal as premium content then the pirate streams will be of less interest. Price will have to reflect the platform on which content is being shared of course.
I took hundreds of pictures today so that I could play with photosynth.
Whilst it has been over two years since I last had a windows laptop today I took hundreds of pictures to play with Photosynth, a photo combining piece of software that runs on your machine before being uploaded to the web.
The idea is a simple one. Take as many pictures as you can be bothered and have at least three pictures overlap the same detail. I tried this in three different locations. The first one was a shopping center. I set the n95 to photograph every ten seconds as I walked but soon realised that this was too slow. That’s when I went to burst mode and photographed the main hall where the elevators were, then the view from the parking lot, and finally in a field where the hay was ready for storage.
In each case I took a sequence of 30-150 images at once. I then sorted the pictures out by sequence before letting photosynth do all the crunching. After a while th result came out and I had a 3D environment in which to click from picture to picture to picture.
The link from image to image is usually quite good although make sure not to leave too big a gap between two images as they will be isolated. Time for you to try it out, to have some fun.
Architecture
Excitement for live streaming from mobile phones
Live video streaming from the mobile phone is normal for me. Yesterday for example I was streaming from the boat as the Croisière de l’espoir came back into port.
Jose Castillo and Tim Siglin talk about highlights from Streaming Media East in New York, including AT&T’s re-emergence as a CDN, a jaw-dropping mobile video webcasting demo by Steve Garfield, and interviews with show attendees.
Interesting to listen to other people discuss this topic.