unmediated

Digium - The Asterisk Telephony Company

Ok, this is a big deal. The next version of Asterisk supports GoogleTalk!

From the Press Release:
Asterisk 1.4 is the first major release of Asterisk since the release of Asterisk 1.2 in November 2005. With over 20 new functionality additions including IPFAX compatibility, unified messaging capabilities and Jabber/Jingle/GoogleTalk protocol compatibilities, Asterisk 1.4 features overall quality and performance improvements, as well as increased scalability and interoperability.

Sony launches HVR-V1E 25P HDV camcorder

"The HVR-V1E has newly incorporated the "3 (three) ClearVid CMOS Sensor" imaging technology. Coupled with Sony's Enhanced Imaging Processor™ (EIP), these sensors provide high sensitivity, low noise and a wide dynamic range to achieve high-quality images. The ClearVid CMOS Sensor also eradicates picture smear and has 4 times high speed scanning capability enabling "Smooth Slow Rec" function.

The Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* Lens features Extra-low Dispersion (ED) Glass and a 20x optical zoom lens with F2.8 at the tele-photo end for greater light sensitivity and long-range image acquisition for maximum shooting flexibility. A Digital Extender feature also enables the tele-photo focal length to be extended by around 1.5 times to a maximum of 1100mm at 35mm conversion.

The HVR-V1E has a range of advanced professional features, including:
*A timecode preset function
*A TC Link to synchronize time codes between multiple cameras
*Two XLR microphone inputs for independent sound recording
*A Camera Profile feature to adjust the camera settings of multiple cameras for multi-camera operations."

Text-to-Speech App for Second Life

Christian Westbrook of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) has made what sounds like a cool text-to-speech translator that works within the virtual world of Second Life. Each participant in a converation chooses a voice and a language that they’d like their chat translated into, and the device speaks the translation in real time. Listen to a sample on Christian’s blog, linked above. I haven’t been able to rendezvous with Christian to check this out, so I’m not sure whether the voice component works behind SL or streams in-world, but it’s a nice idea. Who knows, perhaps soon you’ll be able to listen to 3pointD while you go about your virtual business.

Tiny Hidden Camera system records MPEG-4 to SD

The Elmo SUV-Cam Micro Video Camera System is a tiny camera that captures MPEG-4 at 704x480 resolution to a SD card and is water proof to around 12ft deep. Will set you back around $750 bones. Nifty. The extreme sports applications alone are virtually endless.

(Via DVGuru)

Startup Uses Military Tech to Fix Low Res Video

Motion DSP is creating a simple web based interface that will significantly enhance low resolution camera phone video into surprisingly high quality stuff. It started off in 1998 as a U.S. military funded project at UC Santa Cruz. In January 2005, Professor Peyman Milanfar, the primary researcher behind the technology, co-founded Motion DSP.

The company compares multiple frames in a video to find and replace lost pixels in a given frame, significantly enhancing the experience with little increase in overall file size after compression. The service works best when a video is not moving rapidly or in a jerking fashion, but tends to improve just about any low quality video. To see a demonstration, check out this page on the site that contains three different before and after video shots.

The service will go into consumer beta sometime this year, CEO and co-founder Sean Varah told us. The service will be free and will allow users to upload a video and download an enhanced version. But he also stressed that the focus will be on getting deals done with the large online video sites, such as YouTube, to enhance user-uploaded videos.

Motion DSP is headquartered in San Mateo, California and outsource large parts of software development to Serbia. They’ve raised a $500,000 angel round and are currently pitching a Series A round of financing.

Tags: military, video, youtube, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0

Amazon's aStore

ZDNet.com writes:

The service creates a dedicated retail environment that anyone can use to sell stuff in the Amazon catalog.
...
Everyone has something they want to recommend to others, and a lot of folks want to find ways to display their Amazon Wish List without looking too much like they are addicted to the idea of maintaining a permanent wedding registry—it's so unseemly to always be telling people what you want from them. The system was easy to understand and the product, a multi-page store with a front door consisting of feature products to which I was able to add my own descriptions, much more inviting than the typical list of Amazon links a blogger or Web site might display.

Download YouTube videos directly to iTunes

Originally from digg / Technology, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Aug 30, 2006 at 06:29 PM

Open source OCR in the wild

About as sexy as an eye exam, but damn, this technology is difficult to get right. So yesterday Google announced the open sourcing of Tesseract OCR, character/text-recognition software it developed back in the 80’s that it claims is better than most of the open source alternatives (I’d believe that) but not quite as good as some of the commercially available technologies (I’d buy that too).

But hmm, isn’t there a lot that could be done with this? Personally, can’t wait until we see this make it’s way into OpenOffice among other places.

Pay attention to Dave's newest thing

Dave Winer has come up with a way to make mobile news feeds easy to access and read on portable media devices. He calls it "NewsRiver" and uses the device's browser instead of an RSS aggregator. He's using OPML technology to create a web page that's readable in his River of News style (scrolling through text instead of clicking on headlines).

While this has been available for several months, it has moved to the front burner with Dave, because he recently purchased a Blackberry and is discovering what he likes and doesn't like about the device.

A lot of people are going to say, "Big deal. We can already read news on a PDA." But let's all remember that this is Dave Winer, and when Dave gets excited about something, it's time to stop what you're doing and pay attention.

I wouldn't be blogging if it wasn't for Dave, and I think that's true for most. I wouldn't have an RSS feed if it wasn't for Dave. Podcasting wouldn't exist today if Dave hadn't given his mind to it.

He has a unique way of getting downstream, having an "a-ha" moment, and bringing it back to the rest of us. We look at it and think he's nuts, but that only lasts for a moment.

This discovery has pretty profound ramifications for local media companies, especially those who are currently paying outsider providers to do something similar for them. These companies will likely see their business model disrupted by this simple application.

I love Dave Winer.

Control Ableton Live Wirelessly with a Sony PSP: Now Available for Download, Free

We saw wireless MIDI and mouse control via the Sony PSP, the creation of media artist and hacker Rob King. Now Rob writes to say he’s finished the first release of his software for controlling Ableton Live directly from PSP, and it’s available as a free download.

PLAYLIVE IS HERE [Rob King’s E-mu.org]

The Ableton Live interface is neatly recreated in miniature right on the PSP screen. Features:

1. Wireless control — MIDI sans wires
2. 8 tracks
3. 12 clips per track for clip triggering
4. 4 X/Y pads for joystick-style control (though for touch-X/Y, it’s still all about the Nintendo DS)

ulation is under discussion, but then you wouldn’t be able to use the clip triggers to send MIDI notes. Currently available as a free Windows download, with a Mac version on the way. But even in its current form, this should demonstrate to the folks at Ableton the real breadth of possibilities for controlling their software. Sure, you could have another generic plastic controller and slap an Ableton logo on it, but — Live users can’t be underestimated in their devotion to unique and personal solutions.

Now, we just need wireless MIDI for Nintendo DS. That or else I should take this as a sign that I can justify buying a PSP. Thanks, Rob!

Anyone got a PSP who wants to write up a review of this, let me know!

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=w4fTwf">

ITJ Project Beta Released

Interactive Tele-Journalism
So.. I have finally released ITJ on SourceForge.net.

With support from Konscious and Manhattan Neighborhood Network we have packaged and uploaded the latest version and it can be downloaded at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/itv-ism/.

PodTube v1.0 - djodjodesign

Downloads and transcodes YouTube videos for your iPod

Introducing TypePad Mobile - Mobile Blog Posting

If you have the right type of cell phone (one that runs on Palm OS, Windows Mobile 5 or Symbian Series 60) you can download a mobile client to post to any TypePad Blog that you have access to, according to Sixapart.

You can also download the application directly to your mobile device at http://get.typepad.com/.

The problem is, many of us don't have the right type of mobile phone (mine is a SideKick III which is not one of the supported mobile phones). Many useful applications such as Google Maps with live transit data and now TypePad mobile client exist, but only for certain cell phones; hopefully, in the near future Google Maps and TypePad Mobile will run on most mobile phones.

Links: Sixapart, Techmeme

Sony's WiFi Mylo

Sony is launching its first WiFi broadband communication and entertainment device. The new Mylo personal communicator is capable of operating in any open 802.11b wireless network, in public spaces and within private homes.

The name mylo stands for “my life online”. Sony's device provides instant messaging, browse the Internet, listen to music, send emails and view photos concurrently.

Small enough for a pocket or purse, the slim, oblong-shaped device features a 2.4 inch color LCD (measured diagonally) with a slide out QWERTY keyboard for comfortable and quick thumb typing. With 1GB of the flash memory, the mylo supports the playback of MP3, ATRAC or WMA (secure and unsecure) files.

It features a built-in speaker and can view MPEG-4 personal videos by transferring files via USB cable or with Memory Stick Duo media. You can also store JPEG pictures from the Internet or your digital camera.

The device comes embedded with popular instant messaging services: the Google Talk instant messaging service, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger. These services are free and the product does not require initial computer setup or a monthly service contract.

The product includes JiWire’s hotspot directory listing more than 20,000 WiFi networks in the United States. The mylo personal communicator boots up in seconds and can scan for available wireless networks right away.

The “What’s Up” screen serves as the hub, storing up to 90 of your friends’ avatars so you can quickly see who’s online. You can store up to nine online identities per person which allows you to first choose who you want to chat with then easily initiate conversations using your preferred application.

The embedded HTML browser lets you quickly connect to full Web pages on the Internet. You can also send and receive text emails with web mail services like Yahoo! Mail and the Gmail web mail service.

Providing networking possibilities without a wireless network, the mylo personal communicator detects when it comes into the presence of other mylo units. With the ad-hoc application, you can share play lists and stream music between mylo communicators one at a time.

The mylo device uses a lithium-ion battery that offers up to 45 hours of music playback, around seven hours of chatting and web surfing and more than three hours of continuous Skype talk time. It comes with a microphone, stereo headphones, a USB cable and a neoprene case.

The mylo personal communicator will be available in September for about $350 online at sonystyle.com, at Sony Style retail stores and authorized dealers nationwide.

Perhaps it will be useful for uploading 7 Megapixel stills or 640x480 videos shot from Sony's H-5 ($500). GigOm and Engadget have more.

(thx for the heads up, JB! -kc.)

DOCSIS 3.0

CableLabs has issued a series of specifications for DOCSIS 3.0. It will enable cable operators to offer significantly higher speeds with downstream data rates of 160 Mbps and upstream data rates of 120 Mbps.

The Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS) 3.0, are available at CableLabs. DOCSIS 3.0 features "channel bonding", which enables multiple downstream and upstream channels to be used together at the same time by a single subscriber.

To achieve these higher data rates DOCSIS 3.0 describes a methodology for channel bonding in both the upstream and downstream directions. DOCSIS 3.0 also incorporates support for the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and greatly expands the number of Internet addresses that cable operators may use.

Generally speaking, each 6 MHz channel set aside for data can support an additional 40 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up. The new specs will also support "partial feature compliance" to DOCSIS 3.0.

That option, DOCSIS 2.0b, will be available for DOCSIS 1.1 or 2.0 cable modem equipment and cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) that support downstream channel bonding. This test option also is designed to ensure that the equipment is compatible with forthcoming DOCSIS 3.0 equipment.

In the U.S., cable operators are facing pockets of Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) competition, primarily from Verizon, but whether DOCSIS 2.0 is enough for now, or if downstream channel bonding techniques should be applied before DOCSIS 3.0 becomes commercially available is still uncertain.

There is only so much bandwidth available on coax. Usually it's 750-860 Mhz. Bonding channels could take out some analog (or digital) cable television tiers. That might require a digital cable box for consumers.

CableLabs will begin to conduct interops, certifications and qualification testing against DOCSIS 3.0 products "whenever suppliers are ready, as is our normal position," said CableLabs VP of Broadband Access Michelle Kuska, in a statement.

Big Band is a proponent of switched video. Rather than direct all programs to all areas at all times, a switched broadcast system only provides those programs requested by STBs in each node, freeing dramatic bandwidth to expand programming and other service offerings.

A single head-end computer can monitor and manage all switched broadcast sessions in a cable system. The only significant new hardware requirement is deployment of switches capable of receiving abundant programs over existing high-capacity optical networks, and directing each program towards the appropriate node.

A cable or phone provider can virtually remove capacity limits with switched broadcast. IPTV can support scheduled programming, video on demand and a practically unlimited number of TV channels and video content. IP-TV also enables a range of interactive features, allowing viewers to purchase products shown in a TV program by using Web-browsing functions built into the TV programming itself.

U.S. cable operators have over 73 million TV subscribers, generating revenues of nearly $60 billion per annum," says Analysys, a research firm. DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite broadcaster, has more than 15 million customers while EchoStar serves more than 11.71 million satellite TV customers through its DISH Network.

SBC and Verizon plan an End Game, cherry picking FTTH subs and spending big on infrastructure (until the money runs out).

DTV is another area of potential growth. There will be 11.8 million holdout over-the-air TV households at year-end 2008 who will need DTV converters. The Senate Commerce Committee bill sets aside $3 billion while a separate House of Representatives bill allotted $990 million, or $830 million after administrative expenses for subsidizing DTV settops. The cost of the converters was pegged at $60/each with the subsidies covering only $40. Kagan reviews The State of HDTV.

C/Net, Cable Digital News, Om Malik, EE Times, Business Week, Infoworld, E-Week and Telephony have more.

Executives at the TechNet Innovation Summit in San Jose say this whole Internet thing is still just beginning. Faster access means more industry growth. Says Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: "Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second."

Wonder where your cable dollars go?

Last week Time Warner and Comcast wrote a big check for the assets of bankrupt Adelphia Communications, the sixth-largest cable operator in the country. Adelphia, in turn, paid $56.7 million in salaries, bonuses and special awards to its top five managers since they joined in 2003 and drove it into the ground.

Apple OS X 10.5 "Leopard" officially debuts

Filed under: Desktops

• 64-bit Cocoa and Carbon application support, right beside 32-bit apps, all native.
• Time Machine - Automatically backs up every version of your files to a hard drive or server. Includes snazzy 3D Time Machine view (pictured) to browse through older versions of folders.
• Boot Camp - "Even better." Ships with Leopard.
• Photo Booth - With expanded camera support.
• Spaces - Apple's term for virtual desktops. Allows you to group different applications together in their own environment for different tasks, and allows movement of windows between "spaces."
• Spotlight - Can search other machines over a network. Boolean operations, application launching, and recent items will also be added to the search tool.
• Core Animation - Developer architecture to create moving eye candy with little code.
• Universal Access - VoiceOver enhancements, Braille support, closed captioning and improved navigation.
• Mail - Stationary (templates), Notes (specially highlighted self-sent emails) and To-Do lists all built in.
• Dashboard - New Dashcode tool allows visual template-based Widget development. There's also a new Web Clip app that takes any part of a web page and turns it into a Widget.
• iChat - Allows multiple logins, invisible mode, animated buddy icons, video recording and tabbed chats (hooray.) There's also photo booth effects, iChat Theater (slideshows, Keynote presentations and videos displayed over video chat), and photo/video backdrops.
  
• Enhanced Parental Controls
• Xcode 3

(Check out dem iChat features. -kc.)

YouTube APIs.. Is this new?

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Hmmn.. This could be very interesting..!

"YouTube is excited to offer APIs to the developer community. Using our APIs, you can easily integrate online videos from YouTube's rapidly growing repository of videos into your application. The APIs currently allow read-only access to key parts of the YouTube video respository and user community."

Thanks Steven.

Eye-tracker Quake controls!

Hmm. The problem with this guy is he assumes everyone's seen eye-trackers before and that we won't think he's just controlling the game from under the table.

Where's his other hand? Ahahh!

OK: I jest. I am prepared to believe that eye-trackers exist, and I suppose now that this sort of computer voodoo will probably be mainstream by, like, tomorrow, and that I've just not been keeping up with the latest in awesome hardware developments. Sigh.

Question though: how the hell do you aim?

Super cool eyetracking Quake controls.

(Thanks Adam B!)

Automatically Geotag Your Digital Photos

Sony is introducing a new GPS device that will let you easily add geolocative information to digital photo files and browse your snaps via a Google Maps app using Sony’s Picture Motion Browser. According to a press release, the two-ounce GPS-CS1 GPS device ($150 when it goes on sale on SonyStyle.com in September) is about three and a half inches long and simply clips onto your belt loop or keychain and records your location over time, as near as I can figure. You then import the GPS information, and some Sony image-tracking software matches locations to photos based on timestamps.

Once synchronized, your photos can become virtual push pins on an online map by activating the Picture Motion Browser software bundled with the latest Sony cameras and camcorders released after July. You can easily add new photos and coordinates to the mapping web site, courtesy of Google Maps, and showcase years of globe-trotting.

Neat. Would love to hear more about this, if anyone has any links.

Dear telephone, meet the internet

Pheeder



"Pheeder is a whole new way of using your cellphone: it lets you communicate with all of your friends simultaneously, with a single phone call. To use it, you just call Pheeder, leave a message and hang up. Seconds later all of your friends, or anyone you want, receives the message at the very same instant. And if they want, they can send a reply to your message."

Canon XH G1 and XH A1 HDV Camcorders

Canon has released their first line up of HDV camcorders, the XH G1 and XH A1 and many feel that Canon took its own sweet time on this. Well as they say, better late than never! The imaging system of the these new camcorders is similar to the Canon' XL H1 and has the same three 1/3-inch 16:9 CCDs. The new camcorders have the ability to record 1080i video in both 60 interlaced and 24 frame rate modes. However unlike the XL-H1, the new camcorders are cheaper and sleeker.

(Continued at MobileWhack)

Skype for Mac releases video preview

For anyone hesitant to download the unsupported release that made its way on to digg, Skype officially launched Skype 1.5. Make Skype Video calls to any other Skype user for free. Mac users note that this version of Skype with Video is indeed a preview release so do expect a few bumps a long the way.

On a personal note, I have yet to overcome the video shyness hurdle when it comes to online communications. Anyone else still hesitant?

Wavesat + Freescale

WiFi Planet reports that Freescale Semiconductor and Wavesat today announced a joint reference design for WiMax-enabled CPEs targeted at both residential customers and small to medium sized businesses.

Fawzi Behman, director of Strategic Marketing at Freescale, says the aim is to enable service providers to extend their portfolio of services. Instead of reinventing the wheel to do so, Behman says, it made sense to partner with a company like Wavesat.

The Residential Gateway includes a Freescale MPC8323E PowerQUICC II Pro processor, a DSP for VoIP capabilities, and interfaces including a four-port Ethernet switch and two Mini PCI slots – one for a Wi-Fi LAN and the other for WAN over WiMax.

The board ships with Linux 2.6.x with Samba on Flash. The mini-ITX form factor makes it easy to design compact WiMAX CPE systems. Combined with Wavesat's Mini-PCI card and MAC software, it is said to enable a cost-effective, compact solution for WiMAX-enabled residential gateways.

The reference design adds wireless, voice and video to a media server and allows a service provider to consolidate all their services into one solution. “This enables both wired and wireless solutions for residential gateways,” Behman says.

Recently, Wavesat announced it is developing a 5.8 GHz Mini-PCI module and reference design with Texas Instruments that will be commercially available by Q4 of 2006 from Wavesat.

A $200 WiFi gateway providing both voice and WiFi for $40-$50/month could be a killer product. A licensed 2.5 GHz backbone from Clearwire or Sprint might be one option but a 5.8GHz unlicensed solution could keep the duopolies in check. Satellite tv optional.

Perhaps $5,000, 5.8 GHz WiMAX basestations will take root on the rooftops of community centers.

According to In-Stat, the number of fixed WiMAX subscribers is projected to reach 16 million by 2010, while mobile WiMAX subscribers will range from 15 million to 25 million.

More Cool Location-Based SL Widgetry

After I blogged the location-tracker hacked up for use in Second Life by Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka the other day, Cory sent along a link to a similar service, SLStats [Cory also blogged it, I now see], that was started recently by SL resident Mark Barrett. I’ve also been meaning to look into the new blogHUD built by SL resident Koz Farina, which is currently in alpha. The cool thing about that is that it can be used as a kind of location-tracking device as well.

SLStats comes in the form of a wristwatch, available in Hill Valley Square [< -- SL link] in the Huin sim. Once you register with the service in-world, the watch "watches" where you go, tracking your location as you move around the world, as well as which other avatars you come into contact with. The information is used on the SLStats site to rank most popular regions (among SLStats users, of course), and to track how much time you've spent in-world, which you can view at a link like this one, which tracks Glitchy: http://slstats.com/users/view/Glitchy+Gumshoe.

nately, the service doesn’t let you extract a list of sims you’ve been to and who much time you spent in each (as Cory’s does), but I imagine that information is easily gotten and just a matter of building in the feature. What would be extra cool is if you could overlay lines on the SL Webmap API so you could see your path around the world. There are all kinds of other cool things that could be done with this information as well, I imagine, and I get the impression Mark is planning more in the near future. He wasn’t in-world when I was this morning, but Jerry spoke with him recently and at least found out that he’s a SecondCast fan. (Go us!)

SLStats is also associated with SLBuzz, which seems to be yet another MySpace-like social networking site for SL residents where you can add friends, blug stuff, etc. I love to see people adding functionality to Second Life, but I have to say, I’m sick to death of filling out online profiles, so I doubt I’ll be using this much. The explosion of social networking and Web 2.0 sites in general in recent months is creating a lot of work for very little return, as far as I can tell, and there’s going to have to be some kind of convergence or implosion fairly soon.

But back to our topic. The blogHUD is an unobtrusive heads-up display that lets you post a blog entry to the blogHUD site via either the chat line or a notecard. At the moment, you can browse recent entries, or see entries by a particular person on the “recent blogHUDers” list or from a place in the “recent places” list. A future version will let you browse blog entries by person, by place, or by person in place, and grab RSS feeds for most of those slices, or so I understand. (Remember, this is still in alpha.)

What I like about the blogHUD is the SLurlPane-like SL Webmap that shows up when you click on a blog entry. (That’s a SLurlPane at the top of the right-hand column here.) As you can see in the pic above, you end up with a close-up shot of the location from which the entry was posted, as was as an SL link that will launch you right there, should you find the entry intriguing enough.

Between this kind of stuff, Cory’s hack, SLurlMarkers and various other things that are in development for SL and the Web, we should see some pretty powerful location-based social software popping out of this primordial virtual ooze. Definitely looking forward to it.

Codec for Sony vegas

Sony Vegas is great, but if you make movies witha small digital camera like the Canon Powershots, the videos are in avi format with a codec that Vegas doesn’t have. The result is that, when you add a video to the timeline, only the audio shows up.

A lot of places try to sell you codecs for like 20$.

It took my a while to find, but the first link on this page (morgan-multimedia) is free and works great and fixed the problem:

www.jetdv.com :: View topic - How do I open AVI files create by still cameras?

Flash, FFMPEG and now Thumbnails!

A couple of days ago I got FFMPEG working to automatically generate FLV video files for OpenVlog. Today I finally got thumbnails generating correctly. Here are the commands:

This creates a JPEG:
ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 1 -vframes 1 -f mjpeg -s 320x240 outputfile.jpg

This creates a QT Movie that I am using as a reference movie (just one frame of video):
ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 1 -vframes 1 -vcodec mpeg4 -an outputfile.mov

I got this working with lots of help from the following pages:
Converting Video Formats with FFmpeg
Extracting JPG Frames Using FFmpeg and mjpeg Parameter

Wireless Sports Camcorder

Samsung's rugged sports camcorder, the SC-X210L, is a rugged compact model that records video on SD cards. The original remote lens connected to a helmet or headband via a USB cable. It is now going wireless.

The new SC-X210WL ($599) feature an external lens with a wireless connection.

The new Samsung Sportcams, like the SC-X205WL and SC-X210WL, feature higher resolution and a wireless connection although whether it uses Bluetooth, WiFi, or something else, was not specified.

The camera uses MPEG4 ASP compression, Samsung's electronic image stabilizer, a 680K CCD with 10x optical/100x digital zoom.

With no cords on the camera, you don't have to worry about it snagging on anything. The SC-X210L also doubles as an MP3 player, voice recorder and data storage device. The unit also includes a carrying case and webcam module.

The SC-X205L, SC-X210L are currently available, the SC-X205WL provides 720p resolution, and the wireless version, the SC-X210WL, due in September 2006 at $479.99, $579.99, $579.99 and $679.99, respectively.

Flexible Circuitry

Semiconductor circuits are pretty versatile, but you can't bend the ones in your computer without having to place an expensive parts order with your favourite tech supplier afterwards. Chips are set to become far more flexible in future, however, in both senses of the word - a team of engineers have discovered a way to remove the circuitry from a rigid substrate and place it on a pliable material. Flexible computing could revolutionise a number of technology spheres, medical apps and solar cells for instance.

Attach video to anything

Memory Spot is a tiny radio chip that can contain small videos, audio and text files and then affixed to any object:

"A radio chip the size of a grain of rice that holds up to half a megabyte of video has been developed at Hewlett Packard’s research labs in the UK.

The chip, called a Memory Spot, is small enough to be attached to a postcard or a photograph and could be used to append video, audio or hundreds of pages of text to all sorts of everyday objects. In hospitals, for example, the chips could allow doctors to add detailed medical records to a patient’s plastic wristband…

Plans for the technology were hatched two years ago when HP was searching for a way to add audio data to photographs, Robson says. HP sees a future in which its colour printers will be able to add video, audio and text to a chip already embedded in a printed document."

from New Scientist Tech

Lame and Sox for use with Asterisk

VoIPowering Your Office with Asterisk: Soothing the Savages with Hold Music
Some good little command line snippets for conversion to GSM..

Update to YouTube Greasemonkey script

Just received a patch to the YouTube greasemonkey script I posted a long time ago.

This one should work with the updates YouTube has made to its website.

Right-click to install User Script

Downloaded files must be renamed with a .flv file extension and played back in a Flash Video capable media player.

New Video Comments WordPress Plugin

ITP Research >> Video Comments WordPress Plugin Version 1.2 Released

Here are some new features you can expect:

1: A GUI interface inside the WP administrative screens for posting.

2: Revised comment display on the main post page. Now the timecode is hyperlinked and will bring up the plugin and seek the appropriate place in the video.

3: The ability to put a thumbnail or your own text in the post for launching the player.

4: A couple of random bug fixes.. GREAT!

Egokast video belt buckle

Oh, decisions, decisions. What belt shall I wear tonight to set off my new outfit? Hmm, the traditional leather? The one with the clamp fastener or the metal buckle? I guess I'll just settle on the one with the 3" video display where I can insert an SD card and play movies just below my belly button. Perfect. This bizarre new product from Egokast is just that, a 3" screen mounted in a stainless steel case that can be attached to a belt or armband to display either full motion video or a slideshow of photos. You can insert an SD card of up to 2GB in size and put an entire movie on there if you so desire. You certainly won't have to worry about getting noticed when you're out clubbing, but you will have to worry about your video selection. My choice? Footloose.

Limited to an initial run of 100, the Egokast One (without memory card or belt) goes for $279.

A wrist-worn Linux PC

The Zypad WL 1000, a new wrist-worn PC has been demonstrated to the military forces. This device, which can run Linux or Windows CE, is a hands-free computer which handles wireless networking and GPS tracking. It should be available in July for about $2,500 and could be used by healthcare or law enforcement personnel.

Links: Primidi, ZDNet

3D Shape Search Based on Object Geometry

Glitchy sends along a link to an interesting technology I hadn’t heard of before: 3D shape search. Apparently, a company called UGS Corp. has just bought a 3D shape search technology from German IT services firm software design & managment. UGS’s new Geolus Search product (formerly geolus SHAPE) “allows manufacturers to quickly locate 3D models of digitally defined parts from large heterogeneous data sources on the basis of geometric similarity,” according to a press release.

The technology, which seems to have current application in the manufacture of machine and automobile parts, could serve to enhance content creation through existing 3D model markets like Google’s SketchUp Warehouse, the third-party SketchUp models marketplace, and things like TurboSquid — open markets for 3D models of various kinds. It’s hard to envision the situations in which people will actually need to search for something based on its 3D geometry rather than some metadata, but I’m sure those situations will emerge. Interesting, in any case, to see the emergence of a new 3pointD technology like shape search.

JPEG's Reply to Microsoft WMP: Better JPEG?

The new ITU-T Recommendation T.851 offers better (and faster) compression by introducing a new (backward incompatible) alternative Q15 arithmetic coding. Color precision is increased to maximum 16 bits per color component.

The change is only in the final lossless entropy coding stage. Thus current JPEGs can be losslessly encoded to use new algorithm and the lossiness of this new variant (the blockiness etc…) will be same as that of existing JPEGs.

Work on the new compression algorithm was started in 2004 by ITU-T Study Group 16. An alpha open source implementation is available.

Official results claim around 10% improvement in ratio over old JPEG. StuffIt’s JPEG recompression technology deserves a mention here, they claim a 30% better ratio by taking a similar approach. Thomas Ritcher posted some comparison results with both JPEG and JPEG2000.

ion solo (experimental)

ion solo (experimental) is one of the most exciting developments in videoblogging. It’s an open source java app that plays rss feeds with videos in a beautiful, full screen UI. Check it out!

dsj - DirectShow <> Java wrapper

DirectShow Java Wrapper: humatic - dsj

Very Nice..
From the site:
Need to play Windows Media files and streams, DivX video or DVDs in java? Access WDM capture devices? Control a firewire DVCam? Then maybe this can help you. dsj is an ongoing project to provide a java wrapper around Microsoft's DirectShow API. It offers a set of high level classes that give java easy access to functionality widely missed by java programmers and also lets you dive deeper into the interiors of Windows' core api for 2D media. On the java side dsj tries to keep things open as possible - you may use it standalone or let it feed data into JMF or other APIs.

They also point to a bunch of Open Source projects that are of interest:
Related projects (dsj does not use OpenSource, GPL or LGPL licensed code, but - as you are here - these projects may be of interest, too) :

JMDS - DirectShow Capture api Java wrapper: jmds.dev.java.net - fobs4jmf - ffmpeg c++ & java bindings: http://fobs.sourceforge.net

java VLC - VideoLan java bindings: http://jvlc.ihack.it - DXInput - DirectInput Java wrapper: www.hardcode.de

jARToolkit - ARToolkit java bindings: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jartoolkit/ - jFFmpeg - JMF codec pack: http://jffmpeg.sourceforge.net/

Click.TV video comments

TechCrunch >> Blog Archive >> Click.tv Moves Video Ideas Forward
Had an interesting experience at Vloggercon this past weekend. Although Josh pointed this out to me in the past, I was surprised to find a company pitching similar video commenting concepts that we have been working on.

So.. Perhaps my focus should now shift to getting start-up funding ;-) Any takers?

The Good and The Bad regarding the new 770 firmware

Nokia 770 Linux tablet firmware update beta draws praise, fire
I am particularly impressed by the "Good" list:
VoIP capabilities
IM and Google Talk messaging client
Integrated addressbook with presence information
Better performance, as well as a control-panel option for setting up a swap partition on the rs-mmc card
Better memory recovery when applications are closed
Google search bar available in home screen
Browser URL input field has partial matching
Home screen items now can be rearranged
Thumb keyboard is "input method of choice"
Package manager handles package feeds, and allows custom menu placement

The "Other" Video Comments System

In-side Video Comments
Josh Paul demonstrated his Video Comments system at Vloggercon right after I demonstrated ITP's. His is a system for stringing together videos that are direct responses to the original.

Pretty interesting.. The vloggers love the idea!

What's the Fuss About FOSS?Part 1: An Intro to Free and Open Source Software

If you take a look at some of the comment threads that have taken place on this blog, you’re bound to find some posts by readers talking about “open source” software. For example, Tom Hoffmann recently posted comments on the need for an education-friendly, open source blogging tool. But what exactly is open source, and why should you care about it? This week, I’ll be exploring the issue in two blog posts, with a little assistance from edtech guru David Thornburg, who’s just published a book on the subject. Today’s post will focus on the basics of free and open source software (FOSS).

Video Comments, WordPress Plugin

ITP Research >> Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin

Keeping the conversation alive in media blogs

Video Blogging, Vlogging or what ever you want to call it was born into a tradition of self publishing on the internet and benefits greatly from the infrastructure developed for blogging. The tools to create media and now to distribute media online are accessible and affordable. Furthermore, video blogging is often considered participatory and socially interactive. Much of this is due to what blogs have done, enabled true two-way conversation through comments and loose networking through trackbacks.

Unfortunately, while video blogging benefits from these, it doesn't really do much to improve or enhance this capability with video.

At ITP Research, myself and a couple of others have been working to change this or at least push commenting and trackbacks a bit further. We have created a Video Commenting plugin for WordPress that allows people to leave comments in-time with a video. This, we believe is one of the first steps to allowing conversation to happen around video and furthermore enable richer conversation with video.

Check it out, download it, modify it, use it... Video Comments, WordPress Plugin

From the site:
It’s really exciting to see the number of blogs that exist today, thousands of voices are talking about every possible topic. Blog syndication and commenting allows readers to subscribe, discuss and carry the conversation further, however, with the different forms of media becoming a normal part of many blogs there’s a need to keep this open communication open. Audio and video blogs are forming communities and to encourage conversation the viewers must be able to respond, so we developed a plug-in for WordPress called Video Comments.

(Don't sleep on this one. This is one of those tools videobloggers have been asking for for years. Nice work, ITP -kc.)

Unveiling the Ourmedia Learning Center and Open Media Directory

The Learning Center is an ongoing project with a simple aim: to help people engage in the participatory media movement by showing them how to create videoblogs, podcasts, screencasts, digital stories and other emerging media forms.

There are sections on Video, Audio, Multimedia, Images and Text. In addition, we have what will undoubtedly become a deep Topics section. We're starting out with the subjects of Personal media - Getting started, Citizen journalism, and Copyright & the law.

We have a lot of needs in fillng out these sections, so if you'd like to write a tutorial, share an article, or create a screencast, video or podcast that would be helpful to people, see our guidelines and contact me. This is media training of the people by the people.

The Open Media Directory is a clearinghouse of dozens of different sites where you can find legal, podsafe music, audio and video clips. For anyone who wants to add a music soundtrack to their online video or add music to a podcast, the Open Media Directory is a treasure. Thanks to the UK's David Holmes, the directory's editor, for pulling it together for us.

These projects represent a significant step forward for Ourmedia. We've been promised new servers this month, so look for more improvements in the site in the weeks ahead.

Microformats Search

For many of you this is old news, but I just wanted to make sure everything's seen it…

The week before last, we at Technorati launched an experimental Microformats Search tool in our "kitchen" (where you can taste the products before they're fully "baked").

This is an early stage release, but we wanted to get it out in the world for you to try.

In addition to the search tool, we’ve also started Pingerati.net, a ping system for microformated pages. We're treating this as a community project, too, in which others can recieve the stream of pings for indexing. If you’d like to start recieving pings, just let us know!

DIY waterproof GPS datalogger

Steve writes in about the Sparkfun GPS data loggers, he built a waterproof version - "That unit from SFE is excellent! I packaged one in a waterproof case and use it for recording kayak and boat jaunts... I just nestled the hardware into a carved foam insert inside a SealLine Electronic Case. The wee antenna is lost in the glare; below that is the board, which carries the Lassen iQ GPS, an LPC2138 ARM processor, and a socket on the back with a 256 megabyte SD card. The software strips the NMEA sentences to just the basics, and stuffs them into the card... which has enough space for 440 hours of logging! I haven't checked the power drain yet, but the four 2300 mAH AA NiMH cells should keep it going for quite a while... Photo and the track from a sailboat sea trial are" - Link.

Previous:
GPS data loggers, projects and more - Link.

Casio XJ-S35 Pocket Projector

The quality of projectors gets better and better as they shrink, and the Casio XJ-S35 DLP projector is a prime example of that. This 1024x768 hotshot has 2000 lumens of brightness and a contrast ratio of 1800:1, and although it's not exactly pocketable, it's nice and small at just 10 inches wide by 8 inches long. Looks like it would fit into just about any briefcase, no matter how overstuffed.

Another of its conveniences is its ability to directly play back MPEG-4 video and JPEG graphics via USB, allowing you to put a series of JPEG stills on the thumb drive and play back your presentation even if you don't have a PC handy. Pricing or availability wasn't announced. – Charlie White

Casio pocket video projecteur, the XJ-S35 [Akihabara News]

Jack PC

Jack PC from Jade Integration - a computer in your wall!

The Jack PC is a revolutionary new 'thin client' computer made by Chip PC Technologies. Thin clients are effectively desktop computers designed to connect to a 'terminal server' or Citrix based environment where processing is handled by servers instead of PCs. Thin clients have been getting smaller and smaller over the years however this is the world's first Windows-based thin client small enough to fit in a network wall port. The benefits to business are massive since there's no longer a need for desktop PCs at all - your monitor, keyboard and mouse just plug into the wall!

Use Quake III to “Play” Pd, Max/MSP Synthesis Environments

Gaming environments like Quake and Unreal have become easy interactive 3D development environments. Modify the game maps and objects, and you can make the visual realm in these games whatever you want. But for digital musicians imagining a 3D environment for creating music and sound, they’re limited.

Enter the latest project from fijuu2 creator Julian Oliver, together with Steven Pickles. They wanted powerful synthesis capabilities, which is something you’re unlikely ever to get in a game like Quake III. So, they found a way to send network data from Quake into the free software Pd, using Pd’s netsend object to send UDP packets containing control data from the game. In other words, instead of using a MIDI controller, you can make the game your control instrument. netsend is in Max/MSP, too, so this should work for Max, as well.

You’ll need two machines for this to work right, but the objects are freely available from Julian and Steven; follow the download link on the project page:

q3apd

I’ve been following progress on Julian’s blog; it’s a good read. For more on the work, here’s our friend Chris at Pixelsumo:

q3apd (Quake-Pure Data)

. . . and to see it in action, Julian posts a video:

q3apd in gorgeous OGG video glory

For Pd fans, Steven has a goodie of his own: an abstraction that fakes poly~ from Max/MSP inside Pd, plus some other objects.

Given the ready availability of map editors and such (at least if you have access to Windows), I expect you’ll see more projects like this. We’ve seen work before, certainly, that creates art inside the game engines, but by linking to real synthesis libraries you can do more than just mix pre-rendered sound sources. Speaking of which, any other readers experimenting with game engines? Let us know. And feel free to share in our gaming forum.

New cell phone screens battery friendly

"Qualcomm and others are promoting new screen technology for handhelds and mobile devices that can stay on all day without sapping battery life, thanks to the sun or liquids. As a result, a cell phone equipped with such a screen could continually broadcast stock quotes, news stories or show a music video to go along with a built-in MP3 player. Currently, phone screens stay dark--mostly by necessity.

The difference is that the new screens don't need to be backlit, as do current screens. Instead, they are primarily illuminated by light from the sun or the movement by liquids inside the screen."

Qualcomm Says EV-DO RevA Ready

QUALCOMM today announced it has successfully demonstrated the full mobility of Internet protocol (VoIP) calls over 1xEV-DO Rev. A networks, including mobile, pedestrian and fixed. EVDO (Wikipedia), is a wireless radio broadband data standard adopted by many CDMA mobile phone service providers

The increased upstream capability of Rev A for EV-DO networks (used by Sprint and Verizon) enables them to migrate voice services to Internet protocol (IP)-based platforms for a common service platform.

Previously, an evolutionary strategy to EV-DV (Data + Voice) architecture was planned, but when EV-DO (Rev. A) was announced, Verizon and Sprint dropped their EV-DV technology plans. Now EV-DO Rev. A is the way Verizon and Sprint are expected to move forward.

Field tests involved 62 simultaneous calls in one sector within a single 1.25 MHz channel - in a fully mobile configuration. The test network demonstrated capacity gains approximately 30 times greater than mobile analog voice. Results from a fully loaded commercial network could be somewhat lower.

QUALCOMM says these field tests validate the quality and capacity of full mobility VoIP over EV-DO Rev. A and pave the way to large scale commercial trials by network operators.

“Operators globally have committed to the rapid deployment of CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. A. These tests prove EV-DO Rev. A's capability for delivering high-capacity, high-quality VoIP over 3G mobile broadband networks,” said Dr. Roberto Padovani, chief technology officer of QUALCOMM.

VoIP over EV-DO Rev. A leverages session initiation protocol, commonly referred to as SIP, in combination with a number of advanced techniques to achieve quality of service comparable to traditional landline voice.

QUALCOMM also helps bring IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) strategies to fruition. Operators will be able to efficiently merge their wireless and wireline networks based on IMS. By basing all communications services on an IP network, operators are able to use their network capacity in a much more flexible manner, through the dynamic allocation of capacity to an ever-increasing array of 3G services, such as:

• Push to talk, which is VoIP offered as walkie-talkie-like service;
• Packet-based video telephony, which combines realtime video with VoIP; and
• Simultaneous VoIP calls and data sessions.

While the downlink speed increases from 2.4Mb/s (in Rev. 0) to 3.1 Mb/s (in Rev. A), most of the improvement is in the uplink (reverse link) data rate, increasing dramatically from .15 Mb/s to 1.8 Mb/s in EV-DO Rev A. Low latency is also improved at 50ms compared to approximately 150ms for Rev. 0.

EVDOinfo.com, EVDOforums and 3G News have more.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Mobile WiMAX: The Attack Plan, Verizon Tests Rev A, Qualcomm Buys Flarion, T-Mobile's HSDPA Move, CDMA vs OFDM, Sprint Rolls Out EV-DO, 3G: HSDPA or Not?, HSDPA Tests, Sprint Commits to EV-DO and Cellular At The Races.

Put your video on 13 sites

A new service launched this week, VidMirror, lets users upload the same video to as many 13 Web video host sites. Users can then embed multiple videos in a single player on their blog or Web site, so they won't have a blank space if a host sites deletes their video (or their account).

Mobile Image and Video Posting

Where.com - WHERE Mobile 2.0 API
From the site:
The WHERE Mobile 2.0 API allows developers to add mobile pictures and mobile video clips to web sites with a few simple steps

Very similar to what I have been planning on doing with my Video and Image Moblogging with a (video enabled) Camera Phone Scripts

-Thanks Jenny!

Open-source Radio Revolution

It looks like government control of the airwaves is about to become a much harder prospect. The Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, is an open-source device that can do virtually anything that involves the reception and transmission of radio signals - which means not just radio like you have in the kitchen over breakfast, but all kinds of TV, cell-phone signal, radar...pretty much any broadcast technology at all. All thanks to the magic of general purpose computing and some hardware trickery.

RFID in Japan: DoCoMo Develops "Sound QR Code"

NTT DoCoMo yesterday announced that they developed the acoustic OFDM (Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) technology, which can be used to embed URLs and text data in broadcast music/audio. Consumers' mobile phones "listen" to the music/audio and extract the embedded URLs/data. About 100 characters can be transmitted in a second. (To deploy this technology, broadcast stations will need to install a dedicated encoder. Mobile phones need to be enhanced with a decoder mechanism as well.)

DoCoMo thinks this technology can also be used at shopping malls and supermarkets. Then, the sound from in-store speakers would probably be delivering information about specials, ads, discount coupons, etc. ITmedia describes this technology as "Sound QR Code" or "Sound Toruka" (Toruka allows wallet phones to receive information from RFID readers.)

A similar technology exists for ultrasonic sound, however, DoCoMo's technology uses audible sound that can be transmitted through regular speakers. Also, it sounds like the data transmission speed (1kbps) is pretty good.

via ITmedia

Sun Java ME Device Table Updated

Jave ME Device Table
Sun has updated their Java ME (Jave ?) device listings.. Finally!

J2Me would be the key word here..

NetKernel Open Source Community

From the microkernel to the upper layers NetKernel uses a generalization of REST, the basis for the successful operation of the World Wide Web, and applies it to the finest granularity of resource oriented software composition.

1060 NetKernel is a resource oriented microkernel and RESTful application server created from the convergence and unification of the powerful fundamental concepts found in the World Wide Web and Unix.

NKSE includes extensive functionality including transports (HTTP, SOAP 1.1 / 1.2, REST Web-Services, JMS, Cron, etc.) services (XML and image pipeline processing, RDBMS access, SMTP/POP client, etc), tools (debugger, unit testing, etc.) and a rich set of supported programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, Groovy, Beanshell, XRL, DPML, etc.).

NetKernel has been used to build a wide range of applications, from innovative, RESTful games (such as the bundled Ping Pong application), web sites, corporate information integration systems, digital libraries, and high-performance AJAX based systems.

Vox Blog

As Andre, Mike, and of course Mena have already said more eloquently than I can, Vox is out and it's fantastic.

Without sounding overly grandiose, Vox is the natural progression of the Internet as a social platform. The friends and family features are perfect - you only share what you want with who you want to. And just as Livejournal and Flickr augment your Internet life instead of trying to replace it, Vox plays nice with other open publishing platforms and blogging services.

I don't want to venture too into the world of the negative, but it's not secret that today the majority of web projects and applications are shamelessly mediocre. Too often social websites just become a series of chores and obstacles. List your friends, check for comments, don't miss that "important" piece of news - it's basically furniture dusting. Vox is the exact opposite - of course it rewards you for participation and sharing but it also doesn't punish you if you're simply too busy to spend time blogging - it's always fun.

I can't wait to see what it's like when more of my family and friends (and enemies!) are on Vox - my only frustration to date has been wanting to shout from the mountaintops about how great it is. Now that frustration is gone. Vox rocks!

Java to JavaScript.. Crazy

Google Cleans Ajax for Java
Very interesting.. Will have to give it a shot..
From the article:
The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) released this week is a framework that converts a standard Java application into Ajax that will work in all browsers.

Yippee!

FMJ - Freedom for Media in Java
From the site:
FMJ is an open-source project with the goal of providing a replacement/alternative to Java Media Framework (JMF).

JMF is still dead in the water, despite some folks from Sun making a little bit of noise a couple of months back. Let's hope this effort keeps it going.

Command Line QuickTime Goodness

qp: Command Line QuickTime Player

QTCoffee

qt_tools

USB Client with Antenna Connector

Here's an overdue product -- a USB WiFi client with an antenna connector. WIFI-Link's USB adapter (WL-USB-RSMAP) has a female reverse polarity (RP) SMA connector so you can choose from a huge variety of WiFi antennas (in addition to the one that comes with it).

The MSRP of $49.50 is reasonable. In quantities of 100, it's only $29/each. Coupled with a 16db Vagi ($35, left) it may be just the ticket for residential penetration of WiFi city clouds. It's compatible with Windows 98se/ME/2000/XP and offers up to 256-bit WEP and WPA2 protection.

USB clients are a snap to install. USB cords are cheap and available at any store. USB clients also eliminate expensive, easily broken PC card connectors, RF cable losses and power cords.

The key to "city cloud" residential penetration is a strong signal with a low ($30-$60) CPE price. This may be the proverbial "it".

Pure Data (Pd) on Intel Macs; Learning Pd

Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max and an ongoing presence in developing its open source cousin, Pure Data (Pd), recently told the Pd mailing list he had compiled Pd for Intel Macs. You can download the Intel-native version on his Website:

Software by Miller Puckette

(Curiously, he calls them “iMacs”, but unless he’s modified the UI to look nice on white computers, I think that means Intel Macs!) This is the first step on what should soon bring the full-fledged Pd platform to Intel Macs. In the meantime, I would honestly suggest booting into one of the excellent Intel Linux distributions on this machine, since Pd runs very well on Linux. But it’s good news, nonetheless.

I keep hearing wonderful things about Pd, even from Max/MSP users who use it as to complement Max on various projects. We’ve got a good thread going on the CDM forums about how to learn Pd, alongside a previous thread on open source sound tools, and I just looked through various Pd tutorials on a site called Streaming Suitcase. If you’ve ever got Pd patches you’d like to share, let us know.

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=vDSDjr">

DIY Day: Coming Soon, MAKE’s Controller Kit

Want a truly powerful device for interfacing with motors, sensors, lights, and more? CDM’s assistant editor and Web ninja Jaymis Loveday and I are both excited about the upcoming MAKE Controller Kit, built by MakingThings (of Teleo fame). MAKE has started taking preorders, and shipping should start in a few weeks. You might want to preorder early; this run could sell out given the rapid growth of MAKE Magazine. (If you’re not reading and you’re into DIY, run and get a subscription.)

MAKE Controller Kit

Why is it cool?

It’s 32-bit and much faster than even more-expensive competitors, it’s surprisingly cheap for its capabilities ($150), it’s open source, you can count on lots of documentation and examples from MAKE (well, certainly from me, if you bug me enough), and software for interfacing with Processing, Flash, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd, and C/C++ is all included. That makes it both an incredible bargain and unusually versatile. And it’s great to see MakingThings, which had previously made proprietary hardware, go open source and publish their firmware, even if you never touch it.

The only real problem I can see with the Controller Kit is that it’s overkill for some jobs, larger because of its expanded I/O, and not likely the kind of thing you’d build yourself. There will still be a place for simple USB and MIDI sensor boards (hence we’re covering those today).

The current issue of Make Magazine has a great story on how the board came to be, the process of designing it, and the design goals.

Mitsubishi Demos World's Smallest Projector, the PK10

Powered by three LEDS rather than the traditional lamp, Mitisubishi's PK10, they claim, is the world's smallest projector. The Japanese electronics giant showed just what the PK10 PocketProjector can do when it was installed in a concept car of theirs. Whilst mounted, the projector was used to display various data on a transparent screen on the dashboard.

The PK10 PocketProjector features your everyday RCA inputs on the back, allowing users to connect any number of electronic devices to the projector for some wholesome projector fun.

Mitubishi hails the projector's low cost as a major coup, yet doesn't bother to release price or availability information, if it's coming out for consumers at all.

Mitsubishi PK10 PocketProjector - Worlds Smallest Projector Tried Out In A Mitsubishi Concept CT Care [Mobile Whack via Ubergizmo]

PGP Creator's VoIP Solution

"better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another ZRTP client."

P2P on Mobile Phones

Symella, a Gnutella client for Symbian Smartphones
Listening to a presentation about this now. Pretty interesting but will have to wait to get back to NYC before I can try it (data isn't working in Europe for me).
From the site:
Symella is a Gnutella client for Symbian smartphones. Gnutella is a Peer-to-Peer file sharing network system with many clients (and servers) available on various desktop operating systems (for desktop Gnutella clients check out this site).
It is used for exchanging files, especially music, MP3 files. Because mobile phones have limited bandwidth and small memory cards, this client focuses only for downloading, not sharing. It is available on Series 60 and Series 80.

Blip tv supports windows movie maker

The blip.tv guys are some of the most clued in video technology guys around. Sure, blip.tv is no youTube, but thank god for that. They have a much brighter future. They did it again today, and launched a “very unofficial” Windows Movie Maker plugin.

It worked perfectly for me, here’s the movie.

Super easy!

Windows Movie Maker comes pre-installed on every Windows XP computer (it’s in the accessories folder in your programs), and for simple movies it’s actually quite nice. The plugin is a download and it installs in about 12 seconds (yes, I timed it). I don’t know how they did it, but the site mentions “Blip.tv support in Windows Movie Maker is not endorsed in any way by Microsoft”.

This will make me from a lazyvlogger (who doesn’t post often) perhaps into an active vlogger. It’s really cool. Add blip’s cross-post to your blog functionality, and you got a 1-click winner.

Here’s a screenshot:

DIY Bicycle mounted steady cam

Laurus has an Instructable and video of a DIY Bicycle mounted steady cam project - "I wanted to shoot some video while riding my road bike, but didn't want to deal with a helmet mounted camera and of course I didn't want to hold the camera in my hand. An initial attempt at mounting the DV camera was totally unsatisfactory, so my next step was to build a camera mount that would absorb some of the shock providing a better quality video." - Link.

GameGame: GameGame 1.0 is out

Second, there is a rule manual, with some additional info about the concept and its premises:
Download GameGame-RuleManual.pdf (2751.8K)

Without doubt, there are rule omissions, typos, and such. Please comment on those here for version 1.1.

I would be very grateful to hear about any experiences with the game. Please use the comment function so that anyone visiting can see. You can also e-mail me directly.My thanks to everyone who goes into the trouble of setting the game up!

MythTV to get flash video app (ala YouTube) ?

Checking the comments on my post to slashdot about streaming myth to your phone, theres one from a MythWeb developer (MythWeb being a standard MythTV plugin) which mentions they are actively working to add a flash app that gives you web video access to your tv recordings in the spirit of "google video/youtube". That's quite awesome. Are there phones which do flash?

QuickTime Movie Export for Processing

Daniel Shiffman >> MovieMaker Processing Library
Dan put up a movie export library for Processing.. Cool!

A Pure Java Phone..

Sun blesses Java phone
With a nice set of libraries.. Might have to get me one of these :-)

ion - and iondb - v. nice!

People With Ideas ion 1.0 RC3 and iondb.com
Just had a short opportunity to try out the new ion and iondb. Haven't had a chance to get some heavy usage but right off the bat the webstart is great! The db is fantastic as well, sharing what you are watching with others is one of the first steps to making video on the internet more social and community orientated. Keep going!

One of these days I will contribute a bit back to this project.

IO2Technology: Heliodisplay/ Interactive Free-Space Display

projects on ionized air... not holographic

Tinnos Blufin PMP/PDA: 30GB HDD, Windows CE 5.0

Filed under: Digital Cameras, GPS, Handhelds, Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Prototypes of this little box started floating around a few months ago, and now it looks like it may just be showing up for realz. Dubbed the Blufin, this PMP (or PDA, depending on how you look at it) from Korea's Tinnos, is a Windows CE-based handheld with a 30GB hard drive, 128MB RAM, 2 megapixel camera, a 4.3-inch LCD display, USB and SD slots (with both USB on-the-go and SDIO compatibility for copying files or adding functions like GPS and WiFi) and an AMD Au1200 processor. It'll be available in Japan this July for about $600 and the rest of the world (at least through gray market channels) shortly thereafter.

ted: torrent episode downloader

Java app automatically downloads TV shows that you add to a subscriber list (like a pirate TiVo).

Streaming MythTV to your cell phone

Electrical tape wearing thin holding together my old cell phone (Samsung i500), I decided it was time to give in and upgrade to a new phone. I drank the kool-aid on a 2 year Sprint contract given the discounts both on the phone and in my monthly service, and in the end settled on the Samsung a920. It's an EVDO enabled phone with Sprint's $15 unlimited monthly data service. Playing around with the mobile TV functionality (that's an extra $10/month but I was enjoying the first month free), I had one of those lightning bolt moments.

Why not stream my own video to the phone? Better yet, why not just automate my MythTV to convert my recorded programs and automatically have them ready to be streamed whenever I care to watch them on the phone?

A bit of research later, I discovered SlingBox can stream your tv to your phone, but it needs to be a Windows mobile phone and then there's the monthly service fees and the box to buy. I also found random mythtv devotees with similar ideas at least as far back as January 2005, but couldn't otherwise find a concise guide or more information. Inspired by ZooVision, I knew it was possible for users to stream their own content to their phone, it was just a matter of putting the pieces all together. A couple hours of tinkering later, and I've got a working solution... my "tivo" on my cell phone wherever there's sprint evdo access. So here are the steps:

1. Get MythTV up and running. I won't go into that, but it's worth the hassle even if I couldn't stream it to my cell phone.
2. Follow these directions which will get you an updated version of ffmpeg (named ffmpeg3gp) and a myth3gp script which, in combination, allow you to take Myth recorded video and convert it to 3gp, a mobile video format standard that most multimedia phones support. However, instead of using the myth3gp script from there, you'll likely want to use this myth3gp script as I've included a couple of necessary changes. Save that txt file as /usr/local/bin/myth3gp on your Myth box.
3. Create a directory to hold your 3gp videos on your Myth system. Open up the myth3gp script from the previous step and change the line that says:

   out="/mnt/drive2/myth3gp"

   to:

   out="/directory/for/saving/your/3gp/videos"

4. Install gpac. Once you've compiled and installed gpac, it will provide you with an executable called MP4Box which is used to convert the 3gp file from step two into a 3gp file that is streaming enabled. The myth3gp script calls MP4Box to take care of this for us.
5. Find an internet connected server which can house your 3gp videos and be available to stream them at will to your phone. On said server you'll need to install Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. Installing it can be a bit of pain, but just be sure to have port 554 open so that it can handle the rtsp streaming protocol. For me, getting Darwin to work took the most effort. If your MythTV box has a static IP and is internet accessible, that should work fine, but in my case I'm uploading the videos to another server.
6. We're in the homestretch. We've got programs to convert Myth recorded video to a phone friendly format, and we've got a server that can stream them to our phone. We just now need an automated process to convert the video and upload it to the server running Darwin and we'll be in phone tv nirvana. Myth can do this automation for us. You'll need to exit out of Myth and run:

   mythtv-setup

   From there, choose the "General" menu item and hit enter until you get to the "Job Queue" screen. Put a checkmark in "Allow User Job #1 jobs and continue to the next screen until you get the page with label "User Job #1 description". Give it a description like "Myth 3GP" and for the command, use (note the quotes):

   /usr/local/bin/myth3gp %DIR%/%FILE% 
   
   "%STARTTIME%~~~%TITLE~~~%SUBTITLE%"

   Save your changes, exit, restart the mythbackend and restart Myth.
7. With Myth restarted, go into Utilities / Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> General and click through until you get the "General (Jobs)" page. On this page, put a check in the checkbox next "Run User Job #1 On New Recordings". This will ensure that our process gets run after each new recording. Important Note: For all existing recurring recordings that you had prior to setting up Myth3GP, you'll need to manually edit the recording options and in "Post Recording Processing", you'll need to switch its setting so that it says "Run 'Myth3GP'".
8. If your using your local Myth system for Darwin streaming, just be sure that Darwin knows where to find the 3gp files on your system. Otherwise, edit the myth3gp script from step number two and set the darwin_username, darwin_hostname and darwin_dir as appropriate for your external server. At the bottom of the script, it uses scp to transfer the file from your Myth system to your Darwin server. Though, for everything to be automated, you'll need to set up scp to not require a password. Directions for password free ssh/scp are short and sweet. Once you can transfer files between systems sans password, you are good to go.
9. The final step. On your Darwin machine, make sure you have a web server running (apache), php installed and place this php script somewhere in a web accessible folder. It's job is to scan your 3gp movie folder for movies and generate a webpage with rtsp:// links so that you can access your recordings from your phone. Edit the php script and change $directory to the directory path for your 3gp videos and set $hostname to your hostname. With that installed, you're done. You can manually convert your old recordings by starting the "Myth3GP" job on them and any new recording will automatically get the mobile treatment. Fire up the URL for the mythmobile php script and start streaming.

perl XSPF module

There is now a perl XSPF module on CPAN. This is written by Dan Sully from Slim Devices for use on their Squeezebox device. What this means is that you can enter the URL of a playlist in the Squeezebox controller and listen to it on your living room speakers.

AVCHD High Definition Format to be Developed for SD Camcorders

In what has clearly been a busy day for Panasonic, the company today announced that it has begun developing technology to record HD video onto Secure Digital (SD) cards using the AVCHD format. This format, which was also announced today, will be implemented in the DVD camcorder, as well.

"Panasonic's efforts to develop the technology to record HD images onto SD Memory Cards and construct a new playback and editing environment, in addition to its establishing the AVCHD standard for 8 cm DVDs, will serve to further stimulate development of products that take advantage of the characteristics of both media," said Mr. Akihiro Nakatani, Director of Video Camera Business Unit, Panasonic AVC Networks Company.

The manufacturer has already put one SD-based camcorder on the market, the standard definition SDR-S100, which was released in September of last year. Panasonic did not specify any specific models, either DVD or SD-based, that will utilize the AVCHD format. Burt Desmond, Vice President of the Optical Group in Charge Product and Marketing, was able to confirm, however, that the public could expect to see products delivered "in late 2006 or early 2007, depending on the market."

ZPack File Format, spec and tools

Vaguely PAK like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write).

Today at comp.compression, Brendan G Bohannon announced a vaguely PAK like file format supporting compression and read/write operation (as zipfiles are not that well suited to read/write). The format will assume no fragmentation of smaller files, rather a file is to be moved if it expands beyond the space available to it.

Current default file extension will be “zpk” and will use deflate with a 64kB window. The CRC algo will be the same algo used in ZIP and PNG for example.

You can checkout the code and format specs.

ccPublisher 2 beta 3 Now Available

We've been working hard on ccPublisher 2 lately, and I'm pleased to announce that the third beta is available for download. You can find release notes and downloads for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux here. This release is stable enough for regular use. If you've tried ccPublisher in the past and want to upload a work to the Internet Archive, I encourage you to try this release. We're still working on ironing out the last few wrinkles, but overall this release is more stable and flexible than previous ones.

ccPublisher 2 doesn't add lots of new features to the original ccPublisher feature set, instead opting to focus on the infrastructure of the application. I think it's a strategy that's paying off, and will make the addition of new features far easier in the future. We're already seeing results, as bugs and major improvements to the code base are far easier than they were with ccPublisher 1.

If you have any suggestions, ideas, or bug reports, we'd love to hear them. You can file bugs in the ccPublisher tracker, or join the cc-devel mailing list to communicate with the developers.

HD Video on SD Card?

Still cameras that record HDTV may require solid state memory to keep them compact. That means MPEG-4 AVC encoding will be required to lower bandwidth.

Panasonic and Sony took a step in that direction today when they jointly announced a new MPEG-4 digital-video-camera/recorder format.

The new "AVCHD" format, which will allow recording and playback of high-definition 1080i and 720p video onto 8-cm DVD media, far smaller than today's conventional 120-cm DVD discs, or even the 12-cm miniature DVDs currently used for recording.

Separately, Panasonic said it would use the AVCHD standard to allow consumers to record HD video to standard SD memory cards.

Neither Panasonic nor Sony said when products using the technology would be sold. At the high end, the AVHCD format will allow recording at 1080i at 60 frames per second (1080/60i), 1080/50i, and 1080/24p; while midrange 720/60p, 720/50p, and 720/24p formats will be complemented by a 480/60i format at the low end. In HD, a bit rate around 18Mbps is used.

The AVHCD format will use the AC-3 audio codec to acheive between 64 to 640 Kbits/s of audio data over 5.1 channels, or 1.5-Mbits/s of PCM audio over two speakers.

Panasonic believes the SD Memory Card is the recording media best suited for video cameras, and has already released a professional-use HD video camera that uses SD memory card technology. SANYO's $799 Xacti HD1 can record both 720p high-definition video and 5.1 megapixel digital still images to a standard SD flash memory card. It can record over 21 minutes of 720p HD video on a 1-Gigabyte SD card and 42 minutes on a 2-Gigabyte card.

A cost/effective MPEG-4 AVC encoder might be the tricky bit. Maybe Panasonic will add an audio input jack on their still cameras, too. One can hope.

What's new in Drupal 4.7

A good movie overview of what's new in Drupal:

4.7-whats-new.mov (video/quicktime Object)

IRC on the DS, and DS Lite release day and price

Make magazine today features SylphIRC, an IRC client for the Nintendo DS.

Also, Nintendo announced the DS Lite's release date and pricing in the states- (which everyone reading this probably already knows now): June 11th, for $129.99, just in white (we're assuming they will roll out additional colors later).

Sony DCR-SR100 Camcorder Review

A pattern is emerging. JVC puts a product out on the market, one that everyone wants. The hot new thing. Then Sony, seizing on the opportunity, leapfrogs over JVC with a slightly better version, and takes home the spoils. It happened with high definition, and it's happening again now. Two years ago JVC unveiled their hard disk drive (HDD) Everio series. This January Sony introduced the DCR-SR100. And we have give them credit; this is a solid camcorder, and unquestionably better than the JVC competitors.

(Continued at CamcorderInfo)

Samsung's Single Chip LCD

Samsung has developed what it calls the first amorphous silicon (a-Si) single chip TFT-LCD panel that can actually reproduce colors in high resolution. What this means for mere mortals is that Samsung can make mobile devices even tinier and thinner, where one chip can do the work of numerous chips that came before it.

We're thinking that this 7-inch WGA (854x480) panel might be perfect for some sort of mobile video device, perhaps one with a touchscreen. We're also hoping that the quality of its video is somewhere near that of the picture above.

Samsung Electronics Develops 7-inch WVGA, Single-Chip LCD [AVing.net]

Croquet is out

We already spoke about Croquet in this blog ; but until a few days ago, only a prerelease, "alpha" version, named Jasmine was available on the net. Last week, the first beta version of croquet (full of bugs, but existing) can be downloaded at www.opencroquet.org. Among the creators of Croquet, one may find Alan Kay, one of the greatest pioneers of computer science, former member of the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research center) where the modern computer was invented in the 70’s.

What is croquet ? it might be the future of computing. As its creators say: "…a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using Croquet, software developers can create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations."

documentation they add:

"There are no boundaries in the system. We are creating an environment where anything can be created; everything can be modified, all in the 3D world. There is no separate development environment, no user environment. It is all the same thing. We can even change and author the worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating."

"The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way tocontrol the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would declare himself as King. Thiswas great for the King. And not too bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end – technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides ofthe castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology enables this."

David Meade's player-embed generator

Media Player Test

This script is designed to find all media links on a page and give them an inline (embedded) player. This script requires no special code in the html, all you have to do is include a link to your video (or audio) file. This script is designed to work even for videobloggers who dont know anything about DIV tags, IDs, classes, Javascript, or onClicks ... and who don't or can't worry about crafting specially coded links with onClicks in their posts. The script will do that for them.

Anybody know of other, similar, things?

Meedio released for free as Yahoo Go for TV

Earlier this month, Yahoo purchased much of Meedio and everyone speculated that it would bear fruit in the form of a future DVR software package from Yahoo. Well that happened much sooner than I thought with the launch of the free Yahoo Go for TV software.

Dave Zatz and Eirik Solheim have detailed reviews featuring screenshots and experiences with the install and use of the package. Sounds like it integrates much of Yahoo's properties (like Yahoo Photos and Launchcast for Music) as well as act as a DVR.

JVC Introduces GY-HD200 and GY-HD250

(Continued at CamcorderInfo/)

RFID for fitness clubs

Casio has developed RFID'd rubber wristbands for fitness clubs. The training facilities would have to fit each piece of their training equipment with a a PDA that reads the wristband tags. The PDA would recognize who's using the equipment and display a personalized training session. It also records and displays personal health-related data.

The RFID-tagged wristbands can also do the usual stuff: manage check-in/out, track members' activities, monitor kids' attendance to a fitness program, call fitness club staff in an emergency situation, and serve for cashless payment.

Casio hopes to sell the system to gyms, hot springs, swimming schools, and public bathhouses as well.
Whatever! As long as that bracelet doesn't start to beep loudly when I'm cheating on the treadmill, I'm all for it.

Via RFID in Japan.

Open Revolution

Robert Price has the skinny on Nokia's three new NSeries phones, the N72, the N73 and the N93. Nokia has a demo, specs and description.

• The N72 (pdf) has a 2 megapixel camera, integrated digital music player, integrated browser, FM radio and Visual Radio. It runs on the S60 2nd Edition Operating System.

• The N73 (pdf) has a 3.2 megapixel camera, auto focus, FM radio, integrated stereo speakers with 3D sound. It runs on the S60 3rd Edition Operating System.

• The N93 (pdf) has a 3.2 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, video capture, TV connection, integrated WiFi (b/g) and FM Radio. It runs on the S60 3rd Edition Operating System and features internal memory of up to 50 MB, which can be further expanded with a hot swap miniSD card of up to 2 GB, allowing users to capture up to 90 minutes of MPEG-4 VGA at 30 fps. It's expected to be available in July 2006 with an unsubsidized price of 550 euros.

The new devices support direct uploading of photos to Flickr from the phone. The Flickr uploader can also be repointed to other services like Typepad. If it runs on the 2nd edition S60 platform (i.e. the N72), it may be back portable to the current 2nd edition phones out there. Time to keep an eye on the Nokia download sites incase it sneaks out there.

Nokia seems to be the only company that makes a decent camera phone. I understand that a tiny CCD/CMOS chip can't compete with larger chips in digital cameras, but those lenses -- gosh, what are they thinking?

Nokia's Carl Zeiss lens make a big difference, enabling camphones (with MPEG-4 video) to be competitive with dedicated cameras. Another plus is the WiFi connection. It's perfect for moblogging. Shoot and upload.

Nokia teamed with Six Apart so you can upload posts to your TypePad blog account. TypePad's SplashBlog runs on a wide variety of camera phones and their Widgets provide flexibility. Nokia's Lifeblog 2.0 comes in two parts; software that is loaded onto phones plus compatible software for PCs.

Nokia and Yahoo! announced a deal today to make it easy for mobile photographers to upload and add comments to Flickr. Consumers can connect to their online Flickr accounts without the need to download or install any additional applications. The Nokia N93, Nokia N73 and Nokia N72 are the first Nokia Nseries devices to support Flickr.

You can upload full size photos to Flickr directly from the camera or their image Gallery application. Once uploaded to Flickr, photos can be sent to your blog, as well as edited, organized, tagged and shared. SocialCanvas has a different approach. It enables multiple people to simultaneously zoom in and move around. Extremely high resolution photos are stored on-line, but they're displayed fast in screen resolution.

Of course, WiFi enabled cameras are not standing still.

Kodak is upgrading their Wi-Fi camera this summer to work directly with hotspots and ISPs. The new 6 megapixel model will cost $299 with a $99 Wi-Fi card as an option. Their original 4 megapixel WiFi camera is now $399. Kodak also announced a dual lens BLUETOOTH camera ($449) with 6 megapixels and a 10X optical zoom (right). It shoots MPEG-4 videos at 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 @ 30fps.

EyeFilm combines storage and Wi-Fi into a single SD card and should cost around $99 for a 1 gig version. Whether it can effectively convert a non wireless camera into a wireless one remains to be seen.

You Tube and Google Video may soon allow similar mobile posting. Poynter explains; with a cellphone, you're a journalist.

Want regime change? Talk to the Fins. They are instigating an open revolution.

Elgato releases the tiny EyeTV 250

Elgato, the creators of various software and hardware PVR solutions for the Mac market today released the EyeTV 250.

It only does analog cable/antenna recording, but it does so in a package about the size of an iPod, which is pretty impressive and goes well with the sleek, uncluttered look of most Apple systems. It's $199 and I could see this being a great way to record and load up shows for a video iPod (EyeTV 2 software does this automatically). If I still took a subway to work every day, I'd buy this in a heartbeat to load up The Daily Show and the Colbert Report for my commute each day.

bookmarklet to produce XSPF from HTML

HubLog: VLC, XSPF, Dapper and Tango

I've added a plain XSPF button to Playr, which produces a playlist that can be opened with the external VLC application.

The indirect cause was XSPF support (still buggy) in the latest version of the VLC media player:

The newest version of VLC (OS X version on MacUpdate here), which will eventually be 0.8.5, now supports XSPF playlists. This means that you can make a simple XML playlist filled with URLs to audio (MP3, MP4, WMA, Real Audio, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, etc) and video (a similar list of open and closed formats) and have them all play one after the other, possibly for the first time ever.

USB Flashbag

Visual representation of the amount of data your USB flash drive is holding. The more data you have, the bigger this thing gets [2GB cap]. The balloon like quality is powered by a minco pump from within the device itself. Load it full of data depending on how much of a ergh pant bulge you want.

Podcasting WordPress Plugin

Mighty Seek - Web Application Security Podcast and Blog PodPress
Looks like a nice and fully featured WP plugin..

Features

Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM)
Auto Generation of enclosure tag
Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
Podcast Download stats
Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
Control over where the player will display within your post.
Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
Supports unlimited number of media files.
Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
Preview image for videos
Easy way to link to your podcast within iTunes

OGLE Captures Texture Coords

As of OGLE 0.3b, it is possible to capture texture coordinates (UV) for vertices that have them. This is enabled by the CaptureTextureCoords flag. Coupled with the fact that GLIntercept writes out to disk images for all the texture maps, this allows you to re-texture your capture in Maya with a little menial labor, eg:

This has tested to work accurately on some applications (World Of Warcraft) but on others it seems to misbehave, so it is disabled by default. I am working with Damian Trebilco, author of GLIntercept, to give OGLE the power to do this image-texture-assigning work automatically. Give it time...

Originally from OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D blogs, ReBlogged by fruminator on Mar 31, 2006 at 02:58 PM

daversy.tigris.org

That means that it can help you do the following things :

• Keep a history of changes to your database.
• Instantly create a database for any version of your software.
• Automatically generate upgrade scripts to update your deployed servers.
• Merge changes made by different developers on separate database and deploy them to an integration server.

Bluetooth Adopts UWB

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced an evolution path to over 100Mbps by adopting WiMedia Alliance's version of ultra-wideband (UWB). WiMedia's UWB, also called "wireless USB", is supported by Intel, Microsoft, Sony and Nokia among others.

The UltraWideBand spec split into two incompatible camps,  WiMedia's UWB is not compatible with the UWB Forum standard, promoted by Motorola and Freescale, also called "cable-free" USB.

The Bluetooth SIG will work together with WiMedia to optimize the use of UWB in Bluetooth and to obtain needed worldwide regulatory clearances - something they expect to achieve early in 2007.

The final spec and prototype chipsets are expected to be available around Q3 of 2007. Bluetooth+UWB devices should hit the market early in 2008.

Simple devices such as mono headsets for use with phones will likely remain with the current 2.4GHz Bluetooth technology in order to keep costs down. Initial UWB chipsets are likely to add an extra US$10 to US$15 in cost to devices, though they should quickly fall in line with current Bluetooth chipsets that cost a third as much.

The UWB portion of future Bluetooth devices will run on frequencies above 6GHz, unlike the traditional 2.4GHz band used by Bluetooth and WiFi devices today. Future devices will negotiate with each other to determine whether traditional 2.4GHz Bluetooth or the new UWB connections should be used for a given task based on bandwidth needs. The Bluetooth SIG is hopeful that the UWB system will be as energy efficient as current Bluetooth devices when used within a similar 10m range.

The IEEE 802.15.3a working group hoped to unite UWB factions, but threw in the towel earlier this year and disbanded. The IEEE gave up on uniting the two incompatible UWB camps. In the end there was no consensus between the Motorola/Freescale backed Direct-Sequence UWB group and the Intel-led WiMedia Alliance and its newer cousin EWC, which uses the multiband (MB-OFDM) alternative and frequencies in the 5 GHz band (among other differences).

That means consumers will be stuck with two incompatible UWB standards -- "Wireless USB" and "Cable-free USB". A classic BetaMax/VHS dilema. Now it looks like WiMedia/Bluetooth will be the defacto standard.

Related DailyWireless articles include; UWB Overview, UWB in the Chips, MultiBand UWB Chip Gets FCC Approval, Wireless USB 1.0, UWB Range Doubles, UWB Organizations Merging?, Alereon Gets UWB Recognition, UWB RF-ID, Wireless USB Comes Home, and Microsoft Joins UWB Battle.

The robot bunnies will rule us all

Originally from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent, ReBlogged by Yury Gitman on Mar 28, 2006 at 07:09 PM

Multiuser WordPress

WordPress Multiuser
From the site:
WordPress MU is multi-user version of the famous WordPress blogging application. It is ideal for people wanting to offer a hosted version of WordPress.

This is what I should get up and running for MobVCasting.

Axis 214 PTZ Camera, a dream come true..

I have been waiting for one of these for years. A network PTZ camera that does true standards based streaming. Most of the others from Linksys, DLink and so on seem like they fit the bill but their flavor of "MPEG-4" is only codec deep (if even that) and requires playback to be handled with their proprietary ActiveX or Java players.

Not so with the Axis 214 which not only serves true MPEG-4 content but it is playable with QuickTime and any other player that can handle a standard RTSP MPEG-4 stream. This also means that the streams can be reflected by QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server to allow for a much larger audience than the camera itself can handle.

Unfortunately, getting it to work with the QuickTime Streaming Server but in the end it was well worth it.

In the interest of saving the rest of the world some time I am posting an email message from Kyle Robertson from Apple's Streaming Server User's Listserv that was immensely helpful.

New Picochips for Mobile WiMAX

Mobile WiMAX chip specialist picoChip will start sampling its third generation picoArray processors by mid year. The multi-core processors, dubbed PC202, PC203 and PC205, integrate around 200 individual processors on to each die and deliver over 100GIPs and 25GMACs.

The processors are fully backward compatible with picoChip’s 101 and 102 family of processors that are already designed into products from companies such as Intel, Airspan, Nortel, Fujitsu and Ericsson.

Two of the devices, the PC202 and PC205 integrate an ARM 926EJ-S 280MHz core for control and MAC functionality, the result of a partnership revealed last September. picoChip and Wintegra earlier announced a development platform for mobile WiMAX that integrates picoChip's PC102 picoArray DSP running its IEEE 802.16e PHY with the Wintegra WinMax access processor programmed with 16e MAC software for transport and backhaul.

According to Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at picoChip, the multi-core processors are “the most competitively prices parts of its type, and are amongst the first to get near the $1/GMAC metric when ordered in volume”.

Reference designs are being readied for both 16d and 16e version WiMAX and W-CDMA cellular systems, including versions for HSDPA that will be software upgradeable to HSUPA.

The entry point PC202 is targeted at access points and client side CPE systems, but Baines stressed, “we will not go down to the handsets side of the business. And we have no wish to go head to head with potential customers such as Intel in for instance the lap-tops business.”

The PC203, with 248 processors, is firmly positioned for basestations and support for algorithms such as MIMO and beamforming. This is meant to be used with external control or network processors. The PC205, which also integrates 248 processors and is suitable for high signal processing needs of, for instance, software defined radios.

Airspan's other car, their MacroMAX basestation, uses picoChip components to handle the added funtionality of beamforming and scaleable COFDM found in Mobile WiMAX.

The picoArray chip is said to improve price / performance by combining the price and programmability of a traditional DSP with the performance of a FPGA / ASIC.

Related DailyWireless articles include; PicoChip: Livin' Large, picoChip & ArrayComm, PicoChip Upgrades, Intel WiMax Basestation, Airspan Submits, Airspan/Sequans Declare WiMax Interoperability and Mobile WiMax: It's Done.

The New Amazon S3 API

The big API news today is that the web as platform now has a new world-class storage system designed specifically for developers: Amazon S3, their Simple Storage Service. Amazon has basically taken the online storage infrastructure behind their core online services and provided a public, fee-based interface to it. There’s now a viable “storage cloud” out there for you to use.

Storage isn’t sexy, but as anyone in IT can tell you: almost nothing’s more important than a reliable storage infrastructure. So it’s good news for web platform developers to have this class of storage service available for whatever they need it for. Here is a key part of your virtual data center.

Yesterday I spoke with Adam Selipsky, Amazon’s Web Services VP of Product Management, and Dave Barth, the Product Manager for Amazon S3. They emphasized that that API was designed to a focus on a core set of functions and do them well.

A couple of examples cited in Amazon’s announcement may trigger ideas on what it might be used for:

• University of California Berkeley “Stardust@Home” Team: Saved money by using Amazon S3 to store and deliver the 60,000 images that represent the data collected from their dust particle aerogel experiment. These images will be delivered to 100,000 volunteers around the world who scan the images looking for dust particles from comet Wild2. Since this phase of the project needs the storage for just a few months they were able to ramp up and back down with less investment.
• CastingWords: This small startup offering podcast transcription services were able to save effort and time by using S3 to store and retrieve the original audio files and the transcribed texts.
• BitTorrent: Oh yes, and there is even a section in the online documentation on how to use S3 for BitTorrent files. For publishers of large, popular files the amount of data actually supplied by S3 can be substantially lower than what it would have been serving the same clients via client/server download. Less data transferred means lower costs for the publisher of the object.

Note also what this isn’t: it’s not an online storage service in the same vein as what you’d get from box.net or their competitors. It is a service for developers and not end users. Here, not only there is no friendly user interface, there is no UI at all. For now you can only get to it via code. It is completely and solely for developers to build tools and applications on top of. Thus eventually there will be pretty tools, OS desktop integration, and so on. Amazon pioneered a bit of this API-only model with their unique Mechanical Turk API.

Nor is it like hacks people have built on top of GMail, those are just handy hacks for some power users (speaking of which, it could be that the often rumored GDrive will provide a comparable API but that remains to be seen and Amazon’s API is live now). And while Amazon is first out of the gate in this league there will certainly be some serious competition from the usual suspects.

What does it cost? It’s $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. This model is nice because you only pay for what you use, no more, no less, with no setup fees or monthly minimums.

Technical details? It supports both REST and SOAP, but both score high on simplicity. No fancy extras, just core file services: store, retrieve, delete. No nonessential services. The REST API maps these functions directly to the core HTTP RFC 2616 requests: GET, PUT and DELETE. Everything is an Object which is opaque to Amazon. For more details see their site or the Amazon S3 entry here at ProgrammableWeb.

How reliable is the service and is there an SLA? Amazon says this is a four-nines service with 99.99% uptime and that you can trust it because it’s the same platform they run amazon.com on. There is no written SLA in the same form you would get from your ISP. For some this might be an issue, although certainly many SLAs have no teeth anyway. Given the issues that Salesforce.com has encountered, reliability is a key success factor for Amazon. It would be nice someday if they have some form of a service status dashboard similar to the Salesforce.com’s status.salesforce.com/.

The idea that secure, reliable storage for any given application will just “be there up in the cloud” is powerful and this is a big step in that direction.

Sony Introduces MSVR-A10 Memory Stick Video Recorder

Sony introduced its MSVR-A10, a digital video recorder that records video from a TV or DVD player via composite or S-video and analog audio inputs, recording the signal directly onto a Memory Stick Pro Duo for playback on the Playstation Portable (PSP). That gives you two to four hours of video on a 2GB Pro Duo memory stick. Available in mid-April, it will sell for $215.

Sony MSVR-A10 Memory Stick video recorder [newlaunches]

New WordPress Plugin for Embedding QuickTime movies

QuickTime Embedding WordPress Plugin
I got tired of my XML-RPC posts with QuickTime movies messing up the design of my blog. WordPress automatically would add end param tags and paragraph breaks and all of that inside my Embed and Object tags.
Check it out

Build a bluescreen for special effects for US$30

How to build a large, removable, disposable bluescreen for under US$30. Size: 24′ x 8′ | 7m x 2m. [Stormforce Pictures] [digg / movies]

Buy Apple Computer products at Amazon — your purchase through this link supports Cinema Minima

MapQuest’s New OpenAPI

The other big API news to start the week comes from MapQuest with their announcement of the MapQuest OpenAPI. They’re an established player in online mapping but a latecomer to the open API party. It looks like they’re going try and play off their strengths which include high-quality maps and good routing. Here’s the first new MapQuest mashup: mapzierge.

The API itself is a JavaScript-based API that provides:

• Routing - Integrate MapQuest’s ultra-accurate driving directions to show your users exactly how to get there.
• Mapping - Plot multiple locations on a single map. Choose one of our map styles to create a truly integrated look-and-feel with your website.
• Active Point Markers - Add up to 100 active point markers to a single map. You can also add events, like a pop-up box with key information displayed when users click on or roll over the marker.

The limits? Free of charge for non-commercial use within the stated transaction levels of 50,000 combined maps and geocodes and 5,000 routes per day.

MapQuest’s Anthony Pegg is presenting a session on this tomorrow by at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

And lastly, to go along with the launch of these APIs, they’ve announced a Developers Challenge:

The winning entry will push the mashup genre beyond merely plotting locations on a map, demonstrate some real usefulness to a broader, non commercial community and leverage the full set of tools available in OpenAPI with an emphasis on routing.

The no-framework PHP MVC framework - Rasmus’ Toys Page

Thank you God. Thank you.

The no-framework PHP MVC framework

An intelligent way to build a scalable PHP app. All this stuff I’ve had to figure out for myself, and some of it I got wrong.

I do prefer 1 thing different though. I use a simple template engine. I have NO PHP in my HTML, ONLY html. I edit my HTML pages in Dreamweaver, and often move stuff around and redesign, so this works for me.

Google Video Getter again

It seems the Google Video Getter Greasemonkey script I wrote a while back has become very popular. It was on Digg.com, and since then I've gotten tons of inquiries and comments about it. The Google Video service is still in beta and changes regularly. As such I've had to update the script a few times to keep it functional with their changes.

Here's the latest...

Google Video now uses javascript to load the Flash Player. This kind of breaks the method used previously by my Greasemonkey script because it essentially tries to hide the HTML that the script was searching for. Not to worry though, it was a pretty easy fix. I also tightened up the code to a mere 3 lines!

Click here to install the new Google Video Getter 2

So why do you need this script? Doesn't Google offer downloads for their free videos?
... yes and no.

If you go to any free video offering on Google Video and click the Download button for "Mac and Windows" it forces you to download a Google Video Player application to playback Google's own .gvp video format. These videos do not play in other applications. I checked out the .gvp file, and its really just a text file with a pointer to a video file on the web... I copied the code and manually downloaded the video referenced and discovered it was a .avi (presumably DivX), but it would not play in Windows Media Player because it uses a DRM scheme for file protection.

There are alternative download options for the free videos though. These include videos formatted for the Video iPod and Sony PSP. I haven't really tried these, but I assume they don't have the same DRM protection since they need to be able to play on those devices.

So really, you don't need this script at all. You can download the videos formatted for iPod and PSP from Google Video. But for some reason, people often write me and leave comments asking for this script and how to make it work again.

Eclipse, J2ME/MIDP 2, Mac OS X

ECLIPSE/MpowerPlayer
Looks like suitable instructions for getting J2ME MIDP 2.0 development going on the Mac with Eclipse using the Mpowerplayer SDK.
This has been a long time in coming.. Let's hope it works..

Own Your Del.icio.us Links! | SlashLinks

SlashLinks is a tool developed by Eyebeam R&D for automatically mirroring links from the popular social-bookmarking service del.icio.us to your personal or institutional website. Posting, tagging, and management still occur within the del.icio.us interface, but design and layout can now be fully customized on your mirrored site. The tool also adds blog-like year/month/day archives (similar to Kottke.org's remaindered links) to the typical del.icio.us or flickr style tag browsing.

Xbox Media Center installed

I finally installed XBox Media Center this weekend and I'm thoroughly geeked. It plays just about anything, and I wasn't expecting the picture quality to be so damn good. I realize I'm a little late to the game, but so be it.

I followed ProductWiki's guide to soft-modding and was able to get through it with minimal teeth gnashing. The main reason I hadn't modded before was the pain it is to figure out which mod chip you have to buy, install it, etc. so this soft mod guide was exactly what I needed.

So now that I've caught up with what the Makers were doing 4 years ago, does anyone have any recommendations for cool add-ons for XBMC?

anvil, the video annotation tool

Anvil is a free video annotation tool, used at research institutes world-wide (see the Anvil User Web). It offers frame-accurate, hierarchical multi-layered annotation driven by user-defined annotation schemes. The intuitive annotation board shows color-coded elements on multiple tracks in time-alignment. Special features are cross-level links, non-temporal objects and a project tool for managing multiple annotations. Originally developed for Gesture Research, Anvil has also proved suitable for research in Human-Computer Interaction, Linguistics, Ethology, Anthropology, Psychotherapy, Embodied Agents, Computer Animation and many other fields.

Gungirl Sequencer: World's Simplest, Free Audio Multitrack (Win/Linux)

Gungirl Sequencer

At version 0.3, so your mileage may vary, but could be a fun tool to have around -- or the beginning of your very own audio tool, if you've got the programming chops. Who's the gun-toting grrrl who created this little gem? Um . . . Richard Spindler. So I'm guessing he didn't name it after himself. Via AudioMastermind blog, which has been on a roll lately.

Richard also has a simple open-source movie editor project going that looks quite capable. (Also under development; Linux source only.)

Only Gungirl can give you a ghetto rendition of the Ableton Live knobs, however. Enjoy!.

QuickTime Streaming (without a Mac)

abstract plane - products - uplink

Vara Software : Wirecast

Not sure about either of them as I haven't tested on a PC but looks good..

democracy: roll your own tv

The Participatory Culture Foundation just launched the Windows version of their internet video player (formerly called DTV) today, and renamed their platform Democracy, which includes tools for playing, broadcasting, and sharing net videos. Like FireANT, which also recently had a big upgrade, Democracy Player makes it pretty easy to subscribe to feeds and browse through videos you've downloaded. What's great about the Democracy solution is that it's very easy to create new channels for other people to watch. You can use their Video Bomb to make your own channel with links to videos anywhere - essentially allowing anyone to curate a found video blog like Rocketboom's (great and fun) Apollo Pony, or collect all of their own videos in one place, like someone at the PCF nicely did for the brilliant ladies of The Variety Shac. You can also use Broadcast Machine to host and create your own video blog or channel, complete with torrent creation to ease the bandwidth on your server.

The whole platform's so well-thought out and easy to use that it's a near miracle that this is an open source project by a non-profit foundation, considering the enormous amounts of money and attention lately focusing on this space, and on sites like YouTube and Google Video, and the Video Bomb front page already stands up very well against those sites in terms of sheer time wasting value (personally, I already prefer it).

It'll be interesting to read what people say about this over the next week or so; until then, it's definitely worth checking out on your own.

Windows Vista variations confirmed

Filed under: PC, Microsoft Xbox 360, Online

Microsoft has been vocal about their renewed commitment to PC gaming, but just how many variations of the next Windows will there be? At least eight, confirms TeamXbox, who uncovered a support link on Microsoft's revamped Vista site (which was dead at the time of this writing).

Gamers will want to pick up a copy of Vista Ultimate, which will include a "Game Performance Tweaker" and other offerings targeted at high-end PC users. For more detailed information on each version, check out this earlier Windows IT Pro article.

More Nintendo DS Developments: TV and Browser

Nintendo goes just a little bit further with its plans to update the Nintendo DS, announcing that it should soon be adding features—like web surfing and HD TV programming. Though this would first be for Japanese DS owners, the company hopes to begin selling the web browser (which will work in conjunction with the DS's WiFi wireless network) in June and launch the card with digital TV receiver and antenna by the end of 2006. The web browser was developed with Opera software and should cost about $32.

Other announcements included a new lineup for Japanese software, like a foreign language guide for travelers, a reference guide in Japanese and English, training software to improve penmanship in Japanese and a cooking guide giving step-by-step voice instructions for recipes. Wow. Oh, and Tetris DS that would include characters like Mario and Donkey Kong in awkward poses.

Nintendo unveils TV, Web browser features for DS [Reuters]

skype 2.0

Skype will release a new version of its powerful Internet telephony software that integrates video conferencing for both Intel and PowerPC

A report on MacObserver claimed that Skype 2.0 for Mac (scheduled to ship in the second quarter) would support ten-way video conferences, but would be reliant on the Intel processors Apple now employs.

However, Skype later rebutted these claims, saying: "I can tell you without question that Skype for Mac 2.0, including video, when released, will run on the PowerPC architecture."

He added that one feature may be limited on PowerPC "temporarily" - but not video conferencing:

"There is only one feature that potentially will be limited temporarily to Intel Dual Core machines and that is the ability to host audio calls of between six to ten users," he said.

Skype 2.0 for Windows was announced on February 8, and also relies on Intel processors.

Vlogrolling

Make your own vlogroll and vogroll
Nice vlogroll creation utility:
"generate your own spectacular vlogroll so all your buddies get hooked up, dont leave em in the dark"

Wireless HDMI from Radiospire

Radiospire is continuing the global quest to remove wires completely with their HDMI wireless solution. The connection works up to 15 feet and will transfer at 3Gbps. Meaning you can transfer full HD video and audio goodness without having to compress any of it. Additionally it will clear at least a little bit of clutter behind that TV.

HDTV HDMI Connection Without the Wires from Radiospire [eHomeUpgrade]

Nextel A/V Data Scanner: For NASCAR

If you're a NASCAR fan, check out this stunning piece of equipment from Nextel and Sprint. An audio/video data scanner called the FanView, it will make sure you don't miss one single moment of racing magic—all over the 2.5 GHz wireless spectrum.

Gives you the race telecast, radio broadcast, up to seven in-car camera channels, direct audio feeds from pit and driver, audio replay and a live feed from the official timing and scoring system. Though not for sale, you 'll be able to rent FanView at the race, starting at $50 a day or $70 for the weekend. And remember folks, Nascar revs up on February 19th, so start your engines.

All of NASCAR in the palm of your hand [Mobilemag]

Micro-Mini Projector from Light Blue Optics

And we thought projectors were getting small when they were the size of a Mac mini! Light Blue Optics has created a micromini projector that's the size of—wait for it—a matchbox, and it’s going to be used with a cellphone. Its secret is new PVPro technology, an automechanical process that’s adept at scaling lower resolution images to higher resolutions. PVPro can also take care of pesky annoyances such as keystoning. These capabilities come in awfully handy when you're trying to project a video image onto a nearby wall with a cellphone.

Light Blue Optics is determined to make it easier for cellphone users to share photos with friends and comfortably watch movies on a screen that's considerably larger than a postage stamp. Pricing and availability haven't been announced, but the company will present a PVPro evaluation kit at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona next week.

Micro Mini Projector for your Mobile Phone by Light Blue Optics [Mobile Whack]

Light Blue Optics product page

PVPro technology (pdf)

GPS Tagged Cell Photos

Merkitys is free, open-source software that gives a Nokia cell phone the capability of uploading photos to Flickr and automatically tagging them with location-specific metadata, notes Poynter.

If your phone supports GPS, it'll include the phone's GPS coordinates at the time the photo was taken. Even if your phone doesn't support GPS, Merkitys can include information about the local cell-phone network, which isn't as precise as GPS but still can identify location.

If your phone supports Bluetooth, Merkitys can tag your photos with the local Bluetooth environment -- IDs of nearby Bluetooth devices.

Poynter also has some tips on making photo maps (above) that place thumbnails of your photos on a map.

(Continued at Daily Wireless.)

Friday: New software for vloggers

The brilliant minds at Serious Magic have officially released Vlog It, a $49 piece of software that'll turn your computer into a TV station. These are the same folks who brought us the higher end "Visual Communicator" and that staple yesterday, Video Toaster (remember Garth's T-shirt from "Wayne's World?").

I predict this simple product will revolutionize Vlogs by making it easy for anybody to create real time production for television. Go to the Vlog It site and play the demo. You'll be absolutely amazed. I am, and I'm an old TV guy!

(Continued at The Pomo Blog)

Web 2.0 Video APIs and Mash-ups

ProgrammableWeb: Tag Search

The future..?

Teeny Tiny Hitachi RFID Chip: Big Whoop

Smaller than a grain of salt, Hitachi's newest RFID chip measures .005 x .005 inches and is 7.5 micrometers thin. Using Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology, it uses an external antenna to receive radio waves (2.45 GHz), and transforms it to energy to wirelessly transmit a 128-bit unique ID number for a high level of authenticity. But most importantly for Hitachi, it can make more of these chips on one single wafer, increasing production by four times.

Most importantly for you, expect to see more and more embedded RFID chips in nearly every product you purchase.

World's smallest and thinnest 0.15 x 0.15 mm, 7.5µm thick RFID IC chip [Hitachi]

Easy Software for Making Vlogs realtime

Ever since I did a presentation at the meet the vloggers gathering in SoHo this summer, people have kept asking what software I use to do my vlogs. I’ve been using Wirecast from Vara Software. It’s rather pricey, but it allows for simple changes of precomposed shots with videos, titles, and 2 cameras. It saves the videos right to the desired QuickTime format, or even sets up a video stream. Wirecast is available for the Mac and Windows platforms.

Vara Software has released a lighter version called VideoCue for Mac platform. It is really great as it allows for simple drag and drop of videos, pictures and live camera into a storyboard cue. It also has direct support for adding it to your blog. There is a free trial download to get your feet wet and to see if it is something for you.

Latest Display Technology: SED

LCD, LED, HDTV, plasma, they don’t have anything compared to the latest and greatest display technology that should begin appearing next year. The next big thing is called Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display, or SED for short. Basically it combines the terrific contrast, responsiveness and sharpness of conventional CRT monitors with the power efficiency, size, and thickness of LCDs or Plasmas. Like any new display technology, it will probably cost an arm and a leg.

Right SED Fred [Red Ferret]

NEC's Musical Cellphone Microchip

In response to the rapid increase in the number of mobile phones being used as music players in Japan, NEC Electronics has developed a dedicated SLI chip for audio. This is a companion chip made specifically to enhance audio in cellphones. It has a CPU dedicated to music play, a digital signal processor and a connection for an application processor. It functions with SD cards and supports copyright protection (CPRM). The chip also minimizes battery drain, thus enabling continuous music play for 50 hours. Sampling started yesterday, and mass production is planned for April. Sample price is $13. Hopefully we'll see these in stateside handsets before the end of the decade.

Press Release

Let's Chatsum

Chatsum is a Firefox extension that lets you chat and leave messages on any website for other Chatsum users to see and interact with.

The Chatsum sidebar houses a fully-fledged chatroom, specific to the page you’re looking at, and all the other users in the room are also viewing the same web page. When you navigate to a different page the Chatsum room changes automagically. If you open a page in a new tab, Chatsum will keep pace with whatever you’re viewing. There is the option to switch between a page level room and a site level room, and you can also see what rooms/pages are popular with other Chatsum users.

Safari and Explorer versions are in development and the developers, George Grinsted and Lee Parry, are planning some other interesting community features: including "non-chat" surprises, a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X 10.4, etc.

Check it out, sign up for the beta and help them "squash the bugs."

More background information: Chatsum Development Blog; George's and Lee's blogs.

Video card used as a digital TV modulator

DVB-T is a standard for broadcasting digital television over the air and is found in many countries outside of North America. This hack involves using a video card to generate the DVB-T signal. This project was inspired by Tempest for Eliza, which we covered recently. To pull this off you have to add some custom settings for an additional screen in your X server configuration. When you start up the server and switch to the new screen it will generate the proper signal. The signal strength is pretty weak though and the card has to be wired directly to the DVB-T set-top box. The box will display two different channels, each with a test image. The signal isn’t actually generated directly, but is a product of the VGA card’s DAC’s harmonics.

[thanks james]

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© 2006 Weblogs, Inc.

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A look at Microsoft's IPTV software

(Go check out the rest of Cory Bergman's pics and commentary at Lost Remote)

Adobe puts more Flash muscle into mobile

Adobe announced on January 3 the availability of Flash Lite 2 — a significant upgrade to Flash Lite 1, the mobile devices software that moved on to Adobe’s shelf with the acquisition last year of Macromedia. In the past year, the number of mobile devices running Flash Lite 1 has tripled from 12 to 45 million. The press release for the upgraded product describes it as enabling high-impact experiences for consumer devices.

By leveraging the Flash ecosystem -- which includes the Flash authoring tool, rendering engine, and an established community of more than two million designers and developers -- Flash Lite 2 and Flash Player SDK 7 can reduce deployment costs and deliver content and interfaces three to five times faster than competing solutions.

Google's Blogger Web Comments Extension

Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you're on.

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

Sanyo's Cute HD1 Digital Camera

Sanyo will debut the world's first commercially available smallest, lightest, high-definition compact digital camera. Hell of a title, but that is what it takes to become a world's first. Here is a spec rundown: 5.1 megapixel resolution, 2.2-inch OLED display, HD recording at 720p, 16:9 widescreen format, 10x optical zoom, and weighs only 8.3 ounces. This will be seen at CES this week and expect it to be available to the public in March for $800 bones, pretty good price compared to some HD video cameras that run upwards to $4,000.

Sanyo Xacti HD1 to debut at CES 2006 [Ubergizmo]

Use your camera with multiple apps simultaneously

SPLITCAM video clone capture driver software
From the site:
SplitCamera is a freeware virtual video clone and video capture driver for connecting several applications to a single video capture source. Usually, if you have a web-camera connected to your computer, you cannot use it in more than one application at the same time, and there is no standard Windows options that makes it possible. SplitCam driver allows you to easily multiply your web-camera video in any conferensing software like ICQ, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, or whatever... and to broadcast it to many users at a time. With SplitCam you can connect up to 64 clients to a single video source. In a few words: SplitCam does just what its name says: it splits the video stream coming from the video source and tunnels it to numerous other client applications.

Thanks Spencer

Flickr Services Mobile howto

This is a simple step-by-step guide to creating a mobile application using the Flickr Authentication API. A full spec of the API can be found here. See also: web how-to, desktop how-to.

Build Your Own Game Boy-Synced Hardware Sequencer Machine

Gijs Geikes has been hard at work since we last saw his latest bizarre Walkman Tape Player / Game Boy Sequencer. A new model sync with the Little Sound Dj cartridge: plug in a Game Boy, and other goodies (like a Walkman tape player and Stylophone keyboard), and you can create wild, screaming patterns like this. (A must-listen, experimental punk/hip-hop chiptune creation.)

Gijs has schematics up, so adventurous makers, you can make your own. Or you can just go buy one of those nifty Stylphones.

SEQ05 Pictures, Sounds, Schematics [Gieskes.nl Instruments]

Updated: That link exceeded its bandwidth restrictions, but you can hear the sounds via a new link! (Thanks, Gijs!) Related:
Gameboy Music with LSDJ: Workshops, Tips, Photos, MP3s.

dflare">

Proxying AJAX requests (works for Processing loadStrings and Java Applets as well)

XML.com: Fixing AJAX: XMLHttpRequest Considered Harmful

Oh Snap! Blu-ray Burnin' in January

Looking to get your hi-def, next-gen, hyphenated format on early this year? No worries, mate, looks like a nice new Blu-ray burner is on its way from Pioneer in January. The Pioneer BDR-101A is capable of burning Blu-ray 25GB discs at 72MBps. Totally fast. The drive will also be able to read and play back burned Blu-ray discs, so don't be suprised if you see a surge in legitimate file sharing that's completely legal pirating of movies and warez. No price or release date has been set.

Blu-Ray burner for January! [Akihabara]

MagnaChip 3.2 Megapixel Sensor for Camera Phones

The MC532MA offers both superb low light performance in a small sized module. It operates at 12 frames per second at full resolution and up to 30 frames per second at SVGA resolution.

The MC532MA is expected to be mass produced in the first quarter of 2006, and according to a representative from MagnaChip the performance gap between camera phones and digital camera is expected to decrease. Via Esato.

20051227_MagnaChip.jpg

Garment-Augmented Technology: Cell phones and Shoulder Pad

A Shoulder Pad Insert Vibrotactile Display by Aaron Toney, Lucy Dunne, Bruce H. Thomas, Susan P. Ashdown describes a project that aims at integrate a vibrotatcitle display and support electronics into a standard clothing insert, the shoulder pad.

The shoulder pad in particular was chosen as a highly useful garment insert because of its common integration into
the standard business suit, one of the most culturally pervasive garments in western society.
(…)
The objective for this project was to develop a tactile display contained within a standard shoulder pad that could present a stimulus to the user. More specifically, the display needed to be capable of presenting several distinct stimuli in multiple locations at once, and it needed to maintain the the functions of a shoulder pad: shape, stability, and flexibility.

The pad is meant to display to mimic social conventions such as tapping on the shoulder area for alerts or guidance. One of the authors, Bruce Thomas, reports that:

“As one example, we are working on a set of pager motors integrated into a shoulder pad for a business suit,” Thomas said. One idea is to have silent vibration patterns — similar to custom ring tones — coded to incoming phone numbers. “This way, when you are in a meeting you have a better idea of who is trying to contact you and you are not always pulling your phone out to see who is calling,”

…

Talk Digger: About

simple aggregator combining search engine results.. very efficient -michael

MonitorThis

make it opml and simple...

MyBlogLog

a neat little javascript for inline views on linking activity

Linkubator...add inline links inside your quicktime movies...HOT!

(Nice work, Andreas! -kc.)

Low Power WiFi Standard

The Wi-Fi Alliance now certifies features for Wi-Fi networks that will extend battery life for mobile devices. This extension of the Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) program, called Power Save, helps pave the way for rapid proliferation of Wi-Fi technology into phone handsets where battery life is critical.

WMM Power Save gives device manufacturers and developers a robust framework to improve Wi-Fi power efficiency, via improved signaling capabilities and the opportunity to fine-tune power consumption. The certification for both access points and client devices uses mechanisms from the recently ratified IEEE 802.11e standard, and is an enhancement of legacy 802.11 power save.

"As many as 55 million subscribers for Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones are expected in the consumer market alone," said Monica Paolini of Senza Fili Consulting.

The following devices are the first to be Wi-Fi CERTIFIED(TM) for WMM Power Save, and currently populate the program test bed:

• Atheros AR5002AP-2X Access Point
• Broadcom AirForce(TM) BCM94704AGR Dual-Band 802.11a/g Access Point
• Broadcom AirForce(TM) BCM94309CB Dual-Band 802.11a/g PC Card
• Cisco AIR-AP1231G-A-K9 with AIR-RM21A-A-K9
• Conexant 802.11a/g PRISM WorldRadio
• Marvell Semiconductor 802.11a/b/g WLAN router
• Ralink 802.11a/g Mini PCI
• Winbond Mini PCI 802.11a/b/g WLAN Client

I-Garment for fire-fighters

The i-garment project aims to develop smart garments for for the Portuguese Civil Protection. The suits will be equipped with sensors to monitor position, vital signals (temperature and heart beat) of the firefighters. The information will be sent via a wireless link to Civil Protection Officers in the HQ, processed and returned to the field officers equipped with PDAs and/or TabletPCs.

Tightly integrated with the fire-fighting garment, sensors, telecommunication, localisation, alert and processing hardware collect the status and position of the fire-fighter and transmit it wirelessly and in real time to a data collecting computer installed in local Operational Field Vehicles (OFV).

Besides, the system will allow the data to be transmitted from the local OFV to the main servers via satellite transmission, making the data available from virtually anywhere there might be a fire situation, without the need for further communication infrastructure.

Thanks Antao.

24 ways: Easy Ajax with Prototype

Introducing prototype.js

Prototype is a JavaScript framework by Sam Stephenson designed to help make developing dynamic web apps a whole lot easier. In basic terms, it’s a JavaScript file which you link into your page that then enables you to do cool stuff.

There's loads of capability built in, a portion of which covers our beloved Ajax. The whole thing is freely distributable under an MIT-style license, so it's good to go. What a nice man that Mr Stephenson is - friends, let us raise a hearty cup of mulled wine to his good name. Cheers! sluurrrrp.

"The Movies" game to boost DIY machinima ads

Lionhead Studios has released a tool that allows video game players to easily create their own machinima (wikipedia) and then export their work and upload it to the Web. In the past, only the most hard-core video game players created machinima. Even so, marketers already have started placing ads against machinima. On Heavy.com, for instance, a machinima called Pimp My Weapon, made from God of War, got 6 million streams in its first week.

The Movies positions the player as a Hollywood studio owner. In addition to the business management aspect of the game, players can shoot their own movie--designing costumes, choosing sets, adding subtitles, and dubbing audio, then upload it to a community site run by Lionhead, send it to friends, or post it online.

David Carson, from Heavy.com, explained that machinima have slipped under the entertainment establishment, but have capitalized on the growing popularity of video games. "Nobody in Hollywood would've ever considered, 'Oh my God, this is great entertainment,' but people online say it is, and millions of people are watching it." he said. "The appeal is, it's all based out of video games. Anything that's a derivative of that game, people pay attention to it."

Via MIT adv. lab < Media Post.

o BB's post: Political film comments on French riots using video-game animation.

(Stephen Dinehart showed a machinima short he made using "The Movies" at my USC portable video workshop the other week. It aired on the WB last week in primetime. Good stuff. -kc.)

Samsung Makes Usable, Flexible LCD

Flexible LCDs are pretty important for a few reasons. They can bend without breaking and can withstand some rough treatment now and again without cracking like frat boy on meth. This prototype by Samsung is only 7 inches across but it supports up to 640x480 resolution in color and should end up in laptops and cellphones down the line. They'll have to up the resolution first, but expect a bendy Powerbook any day now.

Samsung claims biggest flexible LCD panel ever [TheInquirer]

Kuwakubo's latest (?) gadget

Kuwakubo Ryota's fluid (first spotted by Jan) reformats live electronic jamming into a hand-held device. The device allow users to create music by stacking loops using a simple loop function, a drum pad and other switches and controls.

The mass-produced finish of fluid makes the rudimentary percussive sound and sequencing tools easy to comprehend. So, one can bang on fluid, squelch the basic synthesiser, loop the noises and alter the tempo.

Kuwakubo's work is a timely counterweight to today's commuting masses that pass through the city, clutching personal audio technology that serves to isolate, as opposed to the connectivity that recent times have promised. A handheld electro radio jamming unit appears to have more in common with the internet forum-based media used to share ones music, video, photography and writing. Here the artist provides us with another dynamic electronic means by which to connect with fellow players.

Part of the Possible Futures: Postwar Art and Technology exhibition, through December 25, at the ICC, Tokyo.

The show features also Modulobe, gravicells, and Room with Edited Soundscape.

More about it in the excellent report by PingMag.

Wmmna love Kuwakubo.

Heat-sensitive keypad new Motorola slider phone

Chinese blogging sites have unearthed details surrounding the Motorola A732, a slider phone whose keypad may look ordinary, but is touch and heat sensitive, allowing you to essentially scribble directly on the screen. [Mobilemag via Phoneyworld]

"Current incarnations seem to recognize both Chinese and English characters, though a North American version probably won’t do Chinese.

... A shopping helper feature lets you take a picture of a product you find in a store, note the price and which shop you found it at, and files away that information for later reference when you find a similar product elsewhere".

The automatic book scanner is here

Rest your wrists! If you have ever manually scanned a book, you realize a machine that can do it for you is a major relief. But the convenience is just a start. As the technology to automatically scan and digitize books is put to work it will multiply the speed at which libraries can put collections online. The vision of all the books ever written being accessible globally is made manifestly more realistic by the automatic scanner.

Kirtas introduces its scanner here with an video of the process. Kirtas says the machine “automates the scanning of bound documents at a capture rate of 1200 pages per hour, while using a page turning process that is more gentle than the human hand."

Opera Does AJAX

Browser developer Opera has launched a software development kit designed to bring to mobile phones dynamic Web applications using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)-based technologies — which are becoming increasingly popular on desktop PCs.

Mobile Web applications created on the Opera Platform Software Development Kit give users access to online resources while providing software developers the ability to integrate mobile phone applications with online content, according to Opera (Oslo, Norway).

AJAX-based Web technologies are becoming more prevalent in desktop applications, driving new Internet services such as Google Maps and Amazon A9 Search. The emerging Web-based techniques, for example, create script on a client while allowing — in the background — XML communication with a server.

As a result, users can grab only the information they need without having to wait for large files to be reloaded onto their screens. "This enables a much more efficient use of bandwidth," said Jan Standal, strategic product manager at Opera. Thus, it’s "much more applicable to mobile phones," he added.

For smartphone users, the kit provides a major upgrade from traditional WAP-based applications, which offered only a basic user interface. Opera has offered the kit to mobile network operators so they can create unique “home screens” on their handsets, using their logos and special links to content.

By releasing the same kit to a larger group of software developers, Opera is hoping richer, dynamic Web applications will proliferate for mobile phones. "This will let software designers develop small, Web-based applications much more rapidly and simply," said Standal.

Starting this month, cell phones can access Google Maps. Google's application can be used on more than 100 current phones that use the Java Brew programming language that can download the Google Local application. From there, they can conduct searches in a specific location and view results plotted on a map.

Google's application and service is free, but users will need an Internet data plan from their cellphone provider, which adds $10 to $25 to monthly bills. Google Mobile and Yahoo Mobile currently provides search on cell phones, but the services are more text oriented.

Google Maps is getting some competition from Yahoo Maps Beta. Local maps have geoRSS feed for searches, showing local traffic conditions, for example. The default view is Flash-based, with an Ajax version of the API available.

Yahoo will introduce its own cell phone, through a partnership with SBC. Operating on the Cingular Wireless network, the phone will link music, photos and e-mail with consumers' existing online Yahoo accounts, address books and preferences. It have an MP3 player, a 1.3-megapixel camera and a removable memory card. The SBC/Yahoo phone will be manufactured by Nokia and is expected to be available early next year for $200 to $300.

Google Location Search can find any number of local resources. O'Reilly has a terrific Collection of Map Hacking Goodies. You can create a real-time GPS tracker using Google Maps API. Don't worry about having a GPS device, you can emulate a garmin using GPSGate.

Yahoo's Konfabulator lets developers create mini applications called widgets (Gallery) used to make customized desktop applications composed like stock prices, traffic conditions or news feeds. AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a framework that allows client side code to work with server side code. It's exemplified by Google Maps and Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site. Like LAMP, it's is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. Server interactions are minimized — data is cached locally. Here's why AJAX is cool and some free source code.

The Mobilized Software Blog follows the field, while The Wireless Athens Project has dozens of great prototypes, proven in the field.

Related DailyWireless articles include; Revenue for the "Free" Cloud, Rebuilding Media, Are City Clouds Safe?, City Cloud Applications, Handheld Content, Seattle's PlaceLab, Streaming Location Content, Handheld Tours, Wireless Museums, GPS Narrative Archaeology, Wireless Walking Tours, Electric Bike Tours, Mapping to Go Projects, My Pal Mickey, Cellular Walking Directions, Ekahau + ESRI, Linkspoint GPS + Symbol, MapInfo's Hotspot Services, MapInfo's Open LS, ATT + Microsoft + Maps, Location without GPS, Location By Triangulation - Not, Open GIS Magazine, Mapping Oral History, Poem Spots, Geocoding the Wiki, The Un-walled Garden, Tracking Individuals, Tracking Bryon, GPS+TV=Location and Location, Location, Location NintendoDS: Voice + WiFi, PSP Podcasting, Handheld Superpower, Hotspot Access for PlaystationPortable, Portable Photostories, WiFi MP3 Players, PSP Hotspot Gets Hotter, GPS Blogging Phones, The Nokia N-90: Journalist's Tool, Podcasting on cellphones, More News Maps, Map Space, Access Points as Pencils, Solar Electric to Go, Virtual Guides, Embedded MP-3 Virtual Tour, Revolution in Mobile Services, Cellular Insurgency, Tsunami Warning Ideas, Pocket Podcast Software, Newsbreak RSS for Phones.

CitizenSpeak Re-launches!

Remember when I begged for money months ago? Well it payed off, and now the new CitizenSpeak has re-launched.

Briefly, CitizenSpeak is a site that allows people to create and host email campaigns. It allows ad-hoc organizing around any issue that puts a bug up someone's butt. I'll probably blog more about it later this week. In the meantime, check out the site or the open source Drupal module that I built for the site.

Big thanks to Jo Lee for being CitizenSpeak, Eric Gundersen at Development Seed for his fantastic design work and Embolden Design for providing hosting!

Does yours vibrate when touched?

Sony is starting to ship samples of their new tactile input device called Touch Engine Module, which can be used to make touch panels, etc. vibrate in responce to a touch.

[Touch Engine]

Touch Engine uses piezoelectric vibrators that can be operated using a low voltage electric power source. Therefore, it could be easily integrated with mobile devices such as digital still cameras, PDAs, etc. (It is already used for SONY UCP-8060, a professional controller device for broadcast stations.) Touch Engine is based on the technology developed at Sony Computer Science Lab.

via Sony Press Relase

NanoLens: Cameraphone Savior?

When the cameraphone first appeared, there was joy throughout the land. Handset shutterbugs dreamed of taking Ansel Adams-like photos without having to drag cameras to high mountaintops. And then there was a collective sigh of defeat. Because, as we all learned in one instance or another, these cameras don't actually take photos. Instead, they render amateur abstract expressionism. But one company is out to restore our faith by making a lens that will make cameraphone pictures usable in the real world. Johnson Electric is that company. It has introduced the NanoLens, a new motion technology that promises to auto-focus cameras in phones. On display in Hong Kong to manufacturers this month, we hope to see it in products as early as next year. Thank you, Johnson. Thank you.

New technology from Johnson Electric promises better pics [Mobilemag]

New tool for backpack journalists

Pathfire has launched Pathfire Direct, a new software tool that aids backpack journalists by delivering a live stream of video or file over an IP network. Pathfire Direct enables point-to-point delivery of both store-and-forward and live video. It gathers, encodes and tags video - using a desktop or laptop computer – then delivers the live stream or file over any Internet Protocol (IP) network, wired or wireless. By implementing Open Standard metadata and encoding, Pathfire Direct fits into existing news production workflows and enables the repurposing of content for the Web or mobile devices. The software helps news organizations deliver real-time news stories from any locations.

Greasemonkeying with Google Video and YouTube

From: http://www.joshkinberg.com/blog/archives/2005/11/greased_google.php

One of the frustrating things about websites that use Flash video is that they rarely provide links to let you download the video files for offline viewing or transcoding/syncing to portable devices like the Sony PSP, video iPod, or Creative Zen Vision.

Case and point: Google Video and YouTube. Neither of these websites allow you to download the video files. This type of lock-down is soooo Web 1.0.

I decided to dive into Greasemonkey and create a couple scripts to expose download links on Google Video and YouTube webpages:

Google Video Getter
YouTube To Me

To install these scripts you will need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. After installing Greasemonkey, relaunch Firefox, then right-click the links above and select "Install User Script." Now whenever you browse to a Google Video or YouTube webpage, you will see a prominent download link at the top.

Welcome to Web 2.0 where the user is in control of the experience.

See the screenshots below to see what these scripts do...

Yahoo's Flash Maps

Google Maps is getting some competition from Yahoo Maps Beta. Local maps have geoRSS feed for searches, showing local traffic conditions, for example. The default view is Flash-based, with an Ajax version of the API available.

Here's the inside scoop from ysearchblog.com:

Today we're giving you a first look at the next generation of Yahoo! Maps which, we think, has a lot of features you're gonna like. We've really worked hard to make the product as intuitive as possible while building in some major upgrades in the interface, interactivity, and functionality. Have a look:

Aside from being far more interactive (click and drag!), there are some major differences we think you'll like.

1. Multi-point driving directions. Get yourself from point A to B and on to C all in one map.
2. Integrated Yahoo! Local. Includes our local search, a browseable interface, easy access to business ratings, reviews, and events.
3. The new overview map (in the upper-right hand corner) helps you get your bearings. The little grey box representing your big map is even drag-able. Use it to move around rapidly without losing context.

In addition to the major features, we added a lot of small touches, including address auto-complete from your Yahoo! Address Book, using your home area or most recently used address to start, and the mini-map and left panel, which can be hidden when you want to focus on just the map. Oh, and the maps are easy to bookmark too. There's no URL obfuscation.

We've got your Flash and AJAX here...

Our launch wouldn't be complete without developer APIs. We've got stuff for hard core hackers and map enthusiasts alike:

• Simple API. To get a custom Yahoo! Map up and running with our Simple API you need only a text editor and a web site.
• JavaScript-based APIs for Flash or AJAX let you choose the tools you'd like. You can host the maps on your site and include any features you like. Grab an application ID and get started with Yahoo Maps APIs.
• Building Block APIs make a lot of the heavy lifting easy. You get features like geo-coding, Yahoo! Local, traffic information and map images.

To get an idea of what's possible, check out the sample applications on our developer network.

The new interface is much more visual, featuring a map of your default location when you start up.

There are also search forms that let you map a specific location, get driving directions by entering a second address, or do a local, keyword-based search. Entering a location causes the map to zoom in on the location. Entering a second address displays driving directions beneath the forms, rescales the map and draws a line illustrating the route.

Drop-down menus automatically keep track of your previous locations, and if you have a Yahoo address book, your entries are also available in the drop-down menu.

Scoble says both Yahoo! Maps and Virtual Earth are doomed: “it’s not about maps, it’s about the advertising".

I2P

"I2P is an anonymous network, exposing a simple layer that applications can use to anonymously and securely send messages to each other. The network itself is strictly message based (ala IP), but there is a library available to allow reliable streaming communication on top of it (ala TCP). All communication is end to end encrypted (in total there are four layers of encryption used when sending a message), and even the end points ("destinations") are cryptographic identifiers (essentially a pair of public keys)."

Canon $500 WiFi Camera

Canon today announced a new compact WiFi camera, the SD430, the first Canon model to feature built-in WiFi (802.11b). The Canon PowerShot SD430 retails for $499 and will be available at the end of January 2006 in the United States.

Canon PowerShot SD430 can also function as a webcam or be remotely operated by a computer. It will offer users the ability to automatically transfer pictures to a personal computer via the wireless link as the pictures are taken. Images can also be sent through a wireless access point.

The wireless features include:

• Wireless direct printing: The supplied Wireless Print Adapter plugs into the PictBridge port and is pre-registered for instant, wireless direct printing to any Canon PictBridge compatible printer2 – including the SELPHY CP range of portable Compact Photo printers. Users can also connect wirelessly via PC1 and configure to print automatically to a USB connected photo printer.
• Auto Transfer mode: The camera automatically transfers each image as soon as it is taken and the supplied software displays the images on the PC as they are received, allowing for real-time full screen viewing with friends.
• Wireless Remote Capture: Enables users to wirelessly control camera shooting functions from the PC1 – ideal for candid party shots or home wildlife photography.
• WEP security and WPA-PSK with TKIP/AES encryption for enhanced data security.

It features a 5-megapixel CCD and 3X optical zoom lens. A movie mode captures 640 x 480 resolution at @ 30 / 15 fps, 320 x 240 @ 60 / 30 / 15 fps and 160 x 120 @ 15 fps.

Purchasers of the camera are eligible for membership of CANON iMAGE GATEWAY, which offers 100 MB of online space for uploading and sharing images. Membership also allows users to download start-up images and sounds to customise their My Camera settings.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

Open Source Windows/Linux FM Synths

But, wait, there's more: CuteVST is a port of Hexter for Linux/LADSPA. Meaning you can download for LADSPA hosts -- and probably meaning you can run this on the Mac, if you're really savvy. I'm just going back to Ableton Operator, thanks.

.

reblog 2.0

Reblog's 1.0 announcement promised "push-button republishing for the masses", and we've been doing pretty well following that track for the past year or so. Last night, we pushed the button on Reblog 2.0. The concept behind the software has always been a form of attention cagefight: many feeds go in, one feed comes out. Reblog closes the loop between piqued interest and publishing by making the act of marking a link for publication a one-step affair. We've long thought this was a pretty interesting addition to the standard functionality of an RSS reader, and I'm surprised to see that in late 2005, there's not a lot of other software that performs the same task.

In the meantime, Reblog has started to see slow but steady growth. Eyebeam and Rhizome both use the software to publish net art blogs, and Eyebeam has an explicit "curator" role in the fortnightly reblogger. Global Voices Online has expressed strong interest in adapting the project to their multitiered reblogging operation, and Reblg from Broadband Mechanics borrowed the term for a similar idea based on microformat republishing from within the browser. A lot of these uses place Reblog in the role of plumbing: like the mixer in your shower, it's there behind the wall but you never see it. Reblog's output is typically meant to be fed into a MoveableType or WordPress plugin, where it surfaces as a series of blog posts on an HTML site annoted with "Originally by so-and-so from..." attribution notes.

We've been thinking a bunch about expanding this role a bit, so that the RSS output from Reblog carries more weight. What happens when you chain a bunch of Reblog installations together, so that the output of one person's attention stream becomes fodder for the next? You get an omnidirectional passive e-mail substitute, great for washes of "FYI" type information and general interest sharing. In a lot of use cases there's no reason for the output to ever make it to a regular blog. Small, distributed groups can use the software to share information among themselves, and only escalate to the relatively disruptive e-mail level when action or response is required. Alternatively, chaining feeds together could result in a progressive-filtering mechanism, reducing the complexity of a thousand feeds into a few pertinent pieces of information through a pyramid of editors.

So, with the interest of making Reblog a more flexible sharing tool, we worked on version 2.0 with a few broad goals in mind:

• Usability: Reblog's user interface needed to help the end-user manage large numbers of feeds more effectively. Tagging feeds & entries has proven to be the most flexible way to accomplish this. We were also interested in ways of making the interface look less... dorky. There was a lot of techno-cruft that just had to go.
• Extensible Input via a public API: Greasemonkey is pretty damn cool, so we thought it'd be useful to provide for a way to perform common Reblog editing actions via a programmable API. XML is boring to parse, so Reblog now has a JSON-RPC API exposed.
• Extensible Output via support for plug-ins: We were strongly interested in seeing some sort of plug-in ecosystem evolve around Reblog. If the software's useful, it makes sense to provide for a way to adapt it to specific uses. My own guide for this has been Blosxom, a simple blog engine written in Perl.

One huge change that became apparent as we wrote 2.0 was the need to post your own entries, independent of any particular feed. Historically, Reblog 1.x assumes that the target blog would be used for this purpose. In 2.0 we've added a "post item" feature, which acts as stripped-down Blogger or Del.icio.us analogue, and handles one of the primary uses cases suggested by Reblg. This idea has been gaining some traction recently, most conspicuously in Mark Pilgrim's microformat atom store concept. Mark decribes the idea as "having your own private database", but my own takeaway from Del.icio.us has been the value of making such micro-information public. Reblog is built to share. Bud Gibson has been referring to this idea as the xFolk Veg-o-matic, a slice & dice greasemonkey-based browser augmentation that trawls websites for microformatted links and posts them into Reblog for you.

We believe this is pretty cool.

CVS camcorder follow-up

It’s been a couple months since the CVS camcorder downloading alpha release. [Matt Gilbert] thought it would be a good idea if we checked up on the community. There has been a lot progress made: from low level stuff like unearthing USB commands to upping the resolution and record length. Modding for macro work and building helmet mounts has also been done. A great overview of how all of this came about is the “credit where credit is due” post. Recently they’ve been dealing with new firmware versions that make the cameras harder to play with (sound familiar?). No worries though, if the solutions maintain the simplicity of jumping one wire there’s a bright future ahead. Congratulations to everyone involved in this project; you’ve done some incredible work.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

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Prodigem Auto RSS Torrent is here!

Taking the "automatically torrent your RSS feed" idea I used for PEP which is an app I wrote to show off Prodigem's shiny new API, I have now distilled it as a direct feature of Prodigem. That means you can now just simply sign into your Prodigem account, go to your "Settings", tell Prodigem your RSS feed address and sit back and watch it auto-torrent. Here's what the Prodigem controls look like:

To put this plainly, this means you can just continue publishing your media through your blog or content management system as you always have, except now whenever your existing RSS feed gets updated, Prodigem reads it and spits out a torrent of your content. You tell your audience about your Prodigem RSS Torrent Feed and you are then automatically on the road to bandwidth redemption.

For the guts of how it works, Prodigem just scans your feed once an hour. It checks the latest 5 RSS items in your feed and if any contain an enclosure, it pulls that enclosure into your Prodigem account via the web and just torrents it. That's it. You can also specify if you want Prodigem to email you whenever it attempts to make a torrent, and you also specify the license you want to use for the content you distribute. Folks, it doesn't get any easier than this.

TV programming via the mobile phone

"Swisscom Fixnet’s electronic TV guide for Bluewin TV 300 can now also be accessed via mobile phone",DMeurope reports."Bluewin TV 300 customers can call up the electronic programme guide on their mobile phones, search for programmes and programme shows via their handsets."

Swisscom offers remote digital TV programming via mobile phone

Socialight

This is shameless self-promotion, but Socialight, the location-based messaging platform I've been working on for quite some time now is in public beta. Woo-hoo!

Socialight is a platform that allows users to create and share location-based messages called StickyShadows. Mobile and web tools give you access to location-based media on your mobile phone and on the web.

It works by taking the media that you create - text and pictures (video and sound coming soon), adding location coordinates, mixing in privacy metadata (based on your social network and group memberships) and storing the final product as a StickyShadow on the server. These messages can then be viewed in the exact location they were created using the Socialight Mobile application, or on the web at socialight.com.

Socialight can be used in lots of different ways. What I'm most excited about is its Groups functionality. By creating your own Group, you can build your own city tour, body of restaurant reviews, or just about anything that links content to places.

Kodak WiFi Camera Review

Glenn Fleishman has a review of Kodak's EasyShare-One:

The is a four-megapixel camera with a 3.3x optical zoom and digital support for up to 10x. It takes both pictures and videos for a list price of $599.

Wi-Fi support comes via an 802.11b SDIO (Secure Digital I/O) card that uses a special slot in the top of the camera.

When Kodak initially announced the EasyShare-One in January, the card was to be sold separately, despite the camera’s lack of features that would warrant a $599 price tag without Wi-Fi. Kodak wisely modified later releases, although the manual still hints that Wi-Fi isn’t a given.

Because of a partnership with T-Mobile HotSpot, you can connect to Wi-Fi at a Starbucks or another location in their network, logging in with an existing account.

Despite the several-month delay in shipping this camera, originally scheduled for a June debut, the firmware supports only WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) for network access. WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and 802.1X support are due in a firmware upgrade within three to six months.

Anyone uncomfortable reverting to WEP or disabling encryption on their network should purchase this camera until the firmware update is generally available.

I can’t recommend this camera wholeheartedly without WPA support, but I do recommend that anyone who wants a Wi-Fi camera watch Kodak’s site for its upgrades. This 1.0 product could mature into a superb 1.1 without a hardware swap out.

Follow Kevin Sites into the Hot Zone. Then you'll know what to do.

Access points with built-in wireless backhaul might be a handy accessory for "event blogging". Commercial ones are available from Linksys, D-Link and NETGEAR. Other WiFi access points with integrated EV-DO backbones include the Entree Box, the StompBox, Junxion Box, Omniway, Possio PX40 Wireless Router and Kyocera's KR1 EVDO/WiFi Router.

The Social Canvas Zoom Server is particularly interesting; it allows multiple users to simultaneously zoom in on tiny areas of an image using a web browser. Screen resolution provides fast display. Upload a 4 Megapixel image (or more) and click to zoom in.

Nikon has two consumer Wi-Fi enabled cameras. The $550 eight-megapixel P1 (specs) and the $399.95 five-megapixel P2 (specs) have built-in Wi-Fi capabilities to transmit images via 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networks. A Time-Lapse function enables the user to capture events occurring over an extended period of time.

Unfortunately, both the P1 and P2 will only send to PictureProject, Nikon's photo software running on a PC and not directly to standard FTP servers or across the Internet. It doesn't connect to the Internet at hotspots which is a huge disadvantage. But once on a PC, pictures can be sent to servers.

DailyWireless has more on Camphones For Journalists, Webcam Situation Report, How To Spend Your Homeland Security Check, Software for Wireless Camera, Wireless Netcams, Mobile Hotspot How To, Wireless Still Photography, Wireless Photography, Podcasting on cellphones, Portable Photostories, On The New Media, Rebuilding Media, Quicktime 7 for Windows, Akimbo Does VideoBlogs, The Podcast Hotel, Video Search, Video Blogging, 360 Video Blogs, 360 Degree Surveillence, Wireless 360 Video, Maxtrix The City, Panoramic EventCams, Nextel Does Photos, Video Wardriving, How To Phone Blog, Video Blog TV Channel, Revolution in Mobile Services, Cellular Insurgency, Tsunami Warning Ideas, Pocket Podcast Software, Newsbreak RSS for Phones, MultiMedia Travel, and Event Blogging.

MicroTrack Digital Recorder Finally Launched

After years of dealing either with those horrid mini tape recorders or small capacity digital audio recorders, it's nice to know about the MicroTrack 24/96 Professional 2-channel Mobile Digital Recorder. Looks like a regular MP3 player, but this heavy duty dealie records WAV and MP3 files, is battery-operated and uses CompactFlash or MicroDrives for storage. Ok, I'll admit, not the prettiest gal around, but can't say she's not sturdy. Sort of a frankenstein monster of a DAT and a digital recorder. All for $500.

NAMM: M-Audio Microtrack: The pro recording iPod [MusicThing]

xm|Edit - Traffic

What is Traffic?

Traffic presents a new model in the non-linear editing school of thought. It utilizes whats called a dependency graph, and it’s the same interface that high-end visual effects software like Apple's Shake uses. Operators connect "nodes" together to form a chain of events they want to perform on a clip. Traffic employs this node-based interface and has infused it with an editor's mindset. Changes and tweaks which seemed too tedious or even impossible to do can now be done in a matter of seconds."

The Better to See You With - The New iPod Hands On

Our woman in the field, Nicole, offers this pithy review:

The screen is gorgeous. Its wider than previous models and overall it feels slim and lightweight. Quicktime 7.03 is necessary to view video, which is great, along with response time. It's good enough to watch an entire movie on it.

Battery life: 20 hours for music, 5 hours for photos, and 2-3 hours for video, more or less—depending on model.

So, we've got ourselves a new iPod. It's not quite the iPod Video, but it's pretty close. Let's look at the specs:

The new iPod is has 4x3 screen, 320x240 pixels and 260,000 colors and does realtime decoding of MPEG4 and H.264 at 30fps. It has video out.

VGA is 480x720, but this is widescreen, which makes it better for video. The resolution is just about half-VGA, which is just about what all the other players in this market are hitting, so we're not entering any new territory here. However, what we have here is a MASSIVE install base. Apple currently has over 84% market share in the MP3 player space. Everyone wants a piece of that pie, and as we well know, millions of OEMs have already attacked the idea of a portable video player with reckless abandon, creating a wasteland of formats, sizes, and devices. Hell, the PSP can play video.

What's going to happen now? You're going to go buy one. Your mom is going to buy one. Your grandma is getting one. And downloadable video will become as commonplace as downloadable music. And Apple will win in this space, as well.

So let's see what we're up against: $399 for a 60GB iPod to update the 40GB we already own. The uptake on this new device will be rather slow. There will be an attack, at first, with millions of units sold. Then Joe Sixpack will drop his iPod on the treadmill and get a new one and be amazed that he can now watch lost. Then Jane WineCooler will look at the Nano and then iPod and figure that maybe she can download some movies from ThePirateBay. Then Creative and Microsoft and all the other boys who ALREADY HAVE MEDIA PLAYERS will try to corner a few studios, much to their folly.

Expect a massive shake-up in the DVD world, as well. Downloadable content with easy video out, a hot little remote control, and a sense of moral superiority will hit NetFlix in the nuts, not even mentioning the deathblow this delivers to Blockbuster.

Sony PCM-D1 Uber Audio Recording Thing

Pardon the lack of technical terms in the title, but we are still trying to figure out everything this does. So, it is a recorder that can save audio onto 4GB of internal memory or Sony's memory stick. It can record 96k-24-bit and features two integrated condenser microphones that provide phenomenal sound quality, and to top it off this thing looks damn cool, period. It is constructed out of titanium and requires four AA batteries for operation. Expect to shell out around $2,000 for this little dandy.

Sony PCM-D1 [Music Thing]

Easily create pop-up windows with embedded video!

Check this out: Video Pop-Up Link Maker

What does it do?

This is a little wizard that writes the code for you to generate pop-up windows with embedded videos. Paste in your video URL, give it a title, and paste an image URL if you'd like. Then copy and paste the
generated code into your blog entry -- Shazzam!

The code generated will launch a small pop up window with your video embedded. Its still a little experimental, but basically works with most video types that play using Quicktime or Windows Media plugins.

Why do I need to do this?

You don't... but you might want to think about it.

Here's the problem... most of us direct link to our videos on our blog and expect them to play fine and dandy in the browser. This is not the case if your viewers are using Internet Explorer, and that's 80% or
more of all Internet users!

When an IE user clicks on a link to your video that is not properly embedded using HTML, they will have to wait until the WHOLE VIDEO DOWNLOADS before they can see anything -- even if you compressed with
Quicktime Fast Start. This is a total bummer. Windows Media is not much better because it will launch in Windows Media Player unless properly embedded using HTML. This is annoying.

So why not simply embed videos in your blog entries? Why launch a pop-up window?

Two reasons:

• many videos embedded on a webpage will cause the page to load very slowly. Even if you use Quicktime poster frames, most web browser will get a headache trying to render your webpage.


• FeedBurner and similar services require direct links to your video files in order to create the Enclosure elements in your RSS feed.

This is in many ways the best of both worlds. It creates a direct link to your video file so FeedBurner will make Enclosures, while at the same time writes the javascript code to launch a pop-up window.

Pretty nifty!

Why did I make this?

I dunno... just a nifty little thing I thought I'd do. I had planned to use it for the Vlogging Hacks book, but that's not happening anymore.... I whipped this up kind of quickly today, so while it works, there's probably some additional features that would be nice to have.

Hey, its a first attempt. Give it a shot and let me know what you think?

The code generator is based on Tantek Celik's hCard Creator

Hope you enjoy!

-josh

TiVo-ish LG Phone

LG has unveiled plans for a phone that has a live video pausing and rewinding feature. Apparently they are labeling this technology as the ever-so-creative "time machine" function. The phone actually looks pretty cool but the newly hyped feature, not so much. I think I would like to see the whole "live television on mobile phone" feature develop some more before manufacturers worry about stopping and rewinding said live television.

LG Launches TiVo-Style… [RealTechNews]

Samsung's Satellite Receiver Does Everything But The Laundry

Looks like it's time for the Koreans to show their tailfeathers at the Korea Electronics Show, from today through Oct. 15. Obviously, we can expect lots of new, cool stuff from LG and Samsung, who are both headquartered there. And believe it or not, this will be the KEA's 37th year. (Ah, those were the days—when all you'd see were tube TVs and kimchee makers.)

Something cool to look out for this year is the Samsung DMB-T450 portable satellite TV receiver. I had to translate the press release from Korean, but it looks like it not only provides portable satellite TV broadcast reception, but also MP3 playback, a digital camera and video recording. We'll see if the translation was way off when the show gets underway, but for now, that sounds pretty good to me.

Samsung Introduces New DMB-T450 Multi-function Device [SamsungHQ]

Datel Launches 4GB Hard Drive for PSP

Now this is a PSP accessory I can get excited about. Datel, which also makes the X2 battery pack for the PSP, has come out with an integrated 4GB hard drive version, effectively making this an external hard drive for the PSP. The Datel MAX 4GB connects to the memory stick port of the PSP, and will utilize its built-in battery pack instead of sapping the PSP's power. As for pricing, Lik-Sang is selling it for $249.99, while Dark Planets is selling it for £137.49 (quoted RSP is £149.99). Considering the price of a 2GB Memory Stick Pro DUO is more than $330, this is looking to be a must-have add-on for those PSP fans that like to pack on the multimedia in their handhelds (TV shows, for example). It will be available later this month.

Max 4GB HDD w/ X2 Battery [Lik-Sang via I4U]
Datel 4GB PSP Hard Drive [Dark Planets via I4U]

Wireless Camcorder

Producers of the Ironman Triathlon qualifier in Madison, WI, last month relied on the RF Central Camera Mounted Transmitter, the 5.8GHz RF Extreme (RFX-CMT) to give their cameraman the opportunity to get close to the action and to move around freely without the restriction of wires.

Designed for electronic newsgathering, the RFX-CMT transforms a standard news gathering camcorder into a digital wireless camera. The transmitter simply clips on to the battery adaptor plate. The device uses COFDM modulation and supports MPEG-2 4:2:0 and MPEG-2 4:2:2 encoding.

For the qualifying event, the RFX-CMT lets the cameraman move around the race transition areas without cables — so there are no safety concerns about interfering with contestants — and still deliver broadcast-quality images.

The Camera Mounted Transmitter outputs 100 mW.

iFill - Griffin Technology

"iFill streams mp3 files from thousands of free radio stations directly to your iPod. You can choose several stations at once and select from many different genres. And since iFill goes directly to your iPod, it won't clutter up your hard drive with extra files."

VGMap by Eyebeam R&D: Google Maps + Flash overlays = very sexy web maps

Over the last month, while picking, choosing, and preparing for our incoming R&D Fellows, I've been hacking on a little something in my spare time. Today it gets to see the light of day so I can see if it has any legs.

Introducing, VGMap, a new free and open-source library that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. It is called VGMap because it adds vector-drawing capability to the already-awesome GMap API.

I have also put together an interactive NYC Subway map using this new library. Hopefully it demonstrates at least a few of the possibilities of what might be accomplished using VGMap.

In fact, I am not really much of a flash developer so I am eager to see if this is put together in a way that makes sense and is usable. I was just curious if it was possible to draw over Google Maps with Flash, and, well, it is!

VGMap: http://vgmap.eyebeamresearch.org/
VGMap-Powered NYC Subway Map: http://nycsubway.eyebeamresearch.org/

Please let us know what you think.

TiVo's New Beta Hosted Apps

This is good news: TiVo is beginning to test hosted Home Media Engine (HME) applications on the server side. So this would mean that soon all TiVos running the latest software would have some new applications available, and you might not need to run the HME software on a local networked PC. 

ComVu's Pocket Webcasting

ComVu says their new PocketPC/SmartPhone software allows you to broadcast using your smart-phone. The feed goes to ComVu's server where other users, whether on a computer or on another smart phone, can pick it up after a 10-second delay from the company's Web site.

ComVu's live video broadcasting solution has been optimized to run on Intel XScale with Wireless MMX and SpeedStep technology to enable live Webcasting from the palm of your hand.

"From Bloggers wanting to transmit video onsite from an event, to families wishing to share special moments with distant members, to first-on-the-scene Citizen Reporters transmitting as a story happens, to workers in the field needing to use video to get their message across -- anyone can now have their own portable TV station ready to broadcast at a moment's notice."

ComVu is developing two technologies to make it happen: live "one to many" transmission from a mobile device and a "do-it-yourself" video networking.

Key service features include:

• Instant notification to groups of contacts via SMS, IM or email.
• Inclusion of tags and other video information to help categorize and search for videos.
• Capture geo-position data in video stream to allow viewers to locate transmission point.
• Immediate posting of video to a blog.

tes "one-button" Webcasting with event notification software. It includes automatic video archiving on ComVu media servers with integrated support for major blogging services and provisioning of a personal Webcast page for easy access to videos by viewers.

ComVu is currently available in beta release for any Windows Mobile 5 device, as well as the AXIA A108 PDA phone, ASUS 730W PDA and Windows PocketPC XScale devices with VEO SD camera. Additional compatible models will be coming soon.

Free trial software is available for downloading. Enhanced broadcast packages begin at $10/month or $80/year that allow for approximately 8 hours of broadcasting or playback, and 100MB of storage.

Related DailyWireless articles include; D-Link Camera Plays on Cellphone, GPS Blogging Phones, The Nokia N-90: Journalist's Tool, Podcasting on cellphones, Meetro Location Net, Portable Photostories, Clear Channel Podcasting, Software for Wireless Camera, Wireless Netcams, Mobile Hotspot How To, Wireless Still Photography, Video Blogging, Nextel Does Photos, Video Wardriving, How To Phone Blog, Video Blog TV Channel, Revolution in Mobile Services, Cellular Insurgency, Tsunami Warning Ideas, Pocket Podcast Software, Newsbreak RSS for Phones, MultiMedia Travel, and Event Blogging.

End-host Multicast Project -- TMesh Tools

"The TMesh Broadcast System is developed as part of the End-host Multicast project at the Unversity of Michigan. The TMesh protocol is designed for efficient peer-to-peer multicast. We have implemented a prototype of the protocol and built a library with the necessary APIs. The TMesh Broadcast System is an audio/video broadcasting tool built using this library. It uses Apple Quicktime and MediaPlayer applications to stream and playback audio/visual content."

Fluxus

Fluxus allows you to write Scheme scripts that create graphics live, interpreting audio and OSC input as a source of animation data. Fluxus also uses a fully featured physics library, which means you can script physical properties into objects and simulate them in realtime. Released for Linux under the GPL licence.

The built in scheme code editor runs on top of the renderer (see screenshots), which means you can edit the scripts while they are running. This allows Fluxus to be used for livecoding performances, or simply as a fast feedback way of experimenting or learning about graphics and animation.

Gigashot V10 in White

We all need a change once in a while, so taking a break from the usual black camera chassis, the Toshiba Gigashot V10 digital camera comes in a lovely Pearl White and includes a 4GB hard drive and a 1/2.5 CCD with 5 million pixels. So you can shoot video at 6.3 million pixels and still photos at 5 million pixels. Up to 128 minutes of video can be recorded on the hard drive and there is an SD slot as well. Also includes a cradle with A/V Out, USB 2.0, LAN and DC-IN. Battery charges under 150 minutes and lasts for 80 minutes for video recording and 120 minutes for playback. Weighs in at 2609 grams. $530.

Toshiba Gigashot V10 Video Camera with 4GB HDD and LAN [Slrworld]

D-Link Camera Plays on Cellphone

D-Link today announced a wireless Internet Camera with 3G compatibility so users can view live video streams from a 3G cell phone.

D-Link's Internet Camera attaches to a home or small office network via a wired or wireless 802.11g/b connection and provides a convenient way to remotely monitor a home or office in real time from anywhere within a cellular phone.

The camera uses a fixed lens camera with resolutions up to 640x480 with user selectable JPEG or MPEG-4 compression. In addition to monitoring via cellular phones, the Wireless Internet Camera also allows for playback using any Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) compatible devices and browsers that offer support for RealPlayer 10.5 and QuickTime 6.5.

The D-Link Wireless Internet Camera with 3G compatibility also comes bundled with free Windows-based surveillance software that can support monitoring and scheduled, motion triggered, or manual recording for up to 16 cameras.

The camera features a built-in web-based user interface and supports both static and dynamic IP addressing as well as Dynamic Domain Name Services (DDNS) support for access to the camera without having to remember an IP address. Pricing and availability were not announced.

International SMS Chatwall released in Dresden

The SMS projector system developed by Haase & Martin GbR is now available in an English version.

The SMS Chatwall receives short text messages, sent by any mobile phone and shows it on TV and projector systems. It is a new media event and promotion tool, separated into an administration and a visualization module. The administration module allows to look over incoming text messages before broadcasting them via projector system. All messages can be accepted, declined or edited by the administrator. Additionally all messages can be accepted automatically. Misuse is prevented. Together with the event organizer the administrator can display own messages or pictures to support an event with multi media screen content.

RFID tag with a display

Epson has recently unveiled a passive RFID tag that features a display. The display component is implemented by using E-ink's EP Sheet and works without batteries.

Via RFID in Japan.

"Magical Tools" for 3D Drawing and Painting

Takeo Igarashi, one of the creators of the software tool for smooth shape manipulations (the one regine mentioned the other day), has been working on a number of very interesting 3D projects. I cannot help talking about his series of works on 3D authoring tools including Teddy (now commercialized as Magical Sketch 2.)

[smooth teddy allows you to easily draw and paint in 3D. download]

Teddy is one of the most well-known works of his, which allows users to create 3D models just by drawing freeform strokes. Such a 3D authoring method could allow anyone to create 3D objects and effectively support creative processes of making 3D characters and objects. Look what kids made using Magical Sketch 2.

Let's say you just finished drawing a man using Teddy and want to paint him pink and dress him up. Igarashi's other software tools can help you (see Chameleon and Sweater). If you think he should dance, please visit Squirrel. Also, Chateau is a tool that can be used to make buildings and houses.

I'd hope to see his ideas and tools integrated into a software package I can buy and use.

PEP is delicious

Introducing PEP, the Prodigem Enclosure Puller. With Prodigem's just released API, I was knocking around ideas about how to show it off quickly and effectively. I'm pretty happy with this first result. PEP is < 400 lines of PHP code I've thrown together (download it at http://prodigem.com/code/pep/pep.txt) which, when given your Prodigem username, password and an RSS 2.0 feed, will then find all the enclosures in that RSS feed and call into Prodigem to have a torrent created for each one. Automatically. You just run and/or cron the script on your home computer or web-server and PEP does the rest.

This bit of hackery (btw, the code has much room for improvement, please someone run with it) of course needed a good first RSS feed. Enter del.icio.us. Using their RSS feed for popular videos, Prodigem now automatically torrents the most popular videos on the web as decided by the del.icio.us folksonomy. That is to say, what the world wants, the world gets.

You can see the results on our newly created pep_delicious user page or even in pep_delicious's own Prodigem torrent feed. If you'd like to discuss PEP or the API (or this blog), that can be done in Prodigem's Forums.

(Hey Josh. Check this one out. Pretty cool. -kc.)

The LaCie Orange

LaCie has always made very nice looking hard-disk related products. I myself own a few LaCie drives—so when I heard about their new Carte Orange drive, I was very excited. $149.99 will net you the 8GB version which is about the size of a credit card. It needs no drivers and is USB 2.0 thank god. A 4GB version is available for $99.99 which is a very nice price for what you get. The sleek orange and metallic design is a nice compliment to any cluttered office desk as well.

LaCie Carte Orange 8GB [LaCie Product Page]

TerraTec USB TV Tuner

Stuck in an airport with CNN yammering on and on in the background? Well, pop in the TerraTech USB TV Tuner and pick up reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond. The TerraTec is a self-contained tuner with software for watching TV on your PC. Interestingly enough, you can also record live video through the tuner and it also pics up digital signals, which I suspect are a bit more prevalent overseas than here.

Overall, looks like a great way to add live TV to a laptop sans breakout boxes and other heavy junk. Pricing is set at about $200.

TerraTec launch USB key TV tuner [Pocket-Link]

APIs for Last.fm and Audioscrobbler

OK - so it continues.

Now Last.fm and Audioscrobbler have annopunced their APIs.

My My My

One can actually imagine a hub to connect all these services together and start doing REALLY interesting stuff - right?

Via Marc's Voice

Opera API for Graphic Interfaces

Device UI toolkit gains low-level graphics API
From the Article:
Opera Software has added a low-level graphics API to its user interface (UI) development toolkit for home media device developers. The addition of GOGI (generic Opera graphical interface) allows Opera's Home Media SDK to build interfaces for devices that lack Qt, X, or other relevant graphical libraries, the company says.

The new D-Snap's are here

Have a look at these two new D-Snap's, the SDR-S100 and SDR-S300. they will be released on the Japanese market mid-Novenmber. They support 2Gb SD's and we still get Mpeg-2 but this time with the use of the DIGA technology (the HDD recorder of the same brand) to render a better video quality. This D-Snap has a 0.8MP LEICA DICOMAR 3CCD sensor.

Canon Announces HDV High Definition XL H1 with 1080i with No 24P for $8,999

(Continued at CamcorderInfo.)

Hasbro Projector, PVR, Other Gadgets for Kids

Man, kids today have all the luck (and I'm not just saying that because I feel old and crotchety). First they get tailored-for-kids cellphones and video cameras, now we have Hasbro churning out an entire entertainment system that's kid-friendly. We're talking a fully-working projector with built-in DVD player here people. The Hasbro Zoombox DVD Entertainment Projector displays images sixty inches or larger, and AV cables allow game consoles to be connected as well. Sure the quality may not be that great but at less than $300, this is probably the most low-cost projector on the shelves. It'll be sold exclusively in New York and online through the HasbroShop this December, and be available nationwide next year.

And just in case your little brat wants more techy stuff to emulate his or her techy parents, there's also Hasbro's VuGo Kids Portable Media Player and DVR unit that contains 128MB of memory.

This is apparently enough to hold an hour of video, 6 hours of music, and over 1,200 photos (you could probably add more since the VuGo has an SD slot). Not too much news on the quality of the screen and all the specs, but considering this PMP actually has built-in DVR abilities is pretty huge for a kiddie device. The VuGo is scheduled to be available later this year, for an extremely affordable $120. Hasbro will even launch an actual video download service for the VuGo, probably full of cartoons and music videos (or whatever it is the kids are into these days).

Hasbro also released four more products that we weren't too excited about but your kid might be: The VCAM NOW (a simple video camera for $79.99), the I-DOG (what sounds like a Sega iDog rip-off for $29.99), VideoNow XP (an interactive video system that plays interactive games, music videos etc. for $59.99), and a ChatNow two-way radio (with the ability to transmit text messages as well as pics, for $74.99).

Heck, for these prices, screw the kids — just get them for yourselves.

Hasbro Zoombox Toy Video Projector with Built-in DVD Player [I4U]
Hasbro VuGo Portable Video Player and DVR [I4U]
Press Release [Hasbro]

How-To: Embed a wifi detector into a backpack strap

We’ve posted our How-To of the week over at Engadget.com. Take a peep at our cool little mod for embedding a wifi sniffer into a backpack strap or messenger bag strap. Haven’t you always wanted to have squishy switches and LED’s built into your bag? Well, now you can! The How-To even has spiffy Flickr photos for your viewing pleasure.

If you make a cool version of this hack, please let us know. We’re sure you’ll come up with all sorts of ways to make this mod better: super bright LED’s, luminescent wire, fibre optics, etc. Take this How-To and run with it yo…

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

Ads by Google

torrentocracy - blog - Announcing the Prodigem BitTorrent Web API

"I'm pleased to announce our new API which will allow any web-capable application on the internet the ability to use Prodigem's creation, hosting and management of torrents through a nice standards based interface. The docs are located at http://torrentocracy.com/mediawiki/index.php/Prodigem_API (the wiki includes links to a live demo page). All you need is a Prodigem account and as it so happens, for a limited time we've opened up our free Preview Account so that they come with full upload and torrent creation capabilities. That last part is a first for us as well, so get 'em while they're hot (and free).

And as it so happens, we've also nicely integrated the phpBB forum and messaging system into Prodigem so there's now a nice shiny place to discuss new things like the API (http://www.prodigem.com/forums/) or just generally mingle.

So all you internet programming types have a look at the API and tell us what you think. We're excited to see what you come up with now that every web application out there can have a 'make me a torrent' button. Or maybe it will be called a 'save my blog from this slashdotting' button, or perhaps a 'our fanbase is community of people already looking for ways to help us' button, or 'my company is in a crunch, Prodigem to the rescue' button, or..."

Get Fireant: Find and Watch Video on the Web

Brand new public beta versions of Fireant released for Mac and PC!

• Fireant plays *any* media format (Quicktime, Windows Media, Flash, Real) and can sync downloaded files with portable media players such as the iPod and Sony PSP.


• Fireant's integrated Yahoo! Video Search helps you find videos you are looking for.


• When a video is playing, you can make it play big!


• Use the magic Comment button to send feedback to video creators.

HP's Wireless HDTV

Hewett Packard today demonstrated HDTVs with wireless access to digital content currently stored on their PCs. The company is also shipping a new line of microdisplay, plasma and LCD TVs as well as its high-definition Digital Entertainment Centers in time for holiday shopping.

The prototype HP HDTVs demonstrated at CEDIA, a consumer electronics expo, contain a built-in digital media receiver that enables the TVs to communicate, wired or wirelessly, with practically any PC in a home. The new TVs won't be able to surf the Web, but they will be able to connect to certain Internet sites to buy or rent movies and download other video content. A wireless connection can pull up archived movies and audio content from a Media Center PC.

Accompanying HP software will allow consumers to create virtual databases of media content on their PCs – from digital images to audio and video files. Once the library of personal media is created and the wired or wireless connections are made, consumers can use their remote controls to easily access libraries of content from their PCs or broadband networks directly on their advanced digital media HP HDTVs.

HP is shipping three sizes of DLP-based microdisplay televisions (MDTVs) in time for the holiday season – in 50-inch, 58-inch and 65-inch sizes. All the MDTVs ship with a built-in ATSC tuner and include a connection panel that enables consumers to hook up to 10 sources in front of the TV.

HP’s HD Digital Entertainment Centers (DECs) are designed to pull everything together in one package, serving as a management, recording and storage component for all digital content – including music, photos, television programming, movies and games. The z555 model comes with a 250 gigabyte (GB) 7,200 rpm Serial ATA hard drive, and the z557 model comes with two 300 GB hard drives, one being a personal media drive to deliver over half a terabyte of combined storage.

Both Media Center PCs offer high-performance TV quality with the Nvidia GeForce 6600 PCI-Express graphics card.

HP estimates that U.S. consumers spend $42 billion a year to upgrade their televisions, buying high-definition and flat screens. At the same time, the way entertainment is stored and delivered is changing.

"We're not building a PC into a TV, but we're enhancing the functionality of the TV to give more access to your content," said Steve Nigros, senior vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing Group.

Sony, Toshiba and Philips are expected to offer similar products. Dell recently began selling televisions. Intel Corp. announced technologies last month designed to make it easier for PCs to play music and video.

HP's new CEO, Mark Hurd, sees entertainment as a key to the firm's growth. Tech companies are spending heavily on entertainment applications.

DVB-H TV From Pace

Pace Micro has announced the launch of the world's first DVB-H H.264 mobile personal video recorder (PVR) - the PDH400.

The Pace PDH400 integrates the new DVB-H standard into its existing mobile PVR device - the PVR2GO - enabling live digital content to be watched and enjoyed by the subscriber on the move - wherever they are, whenever they want.

With a 4.3" color widescreen display, the PDH400 also works as a shared experience for viewers. DVB-H trials are now underway in Finland (Helsinki), Germany (Berlin), United Kingdom (Oxford) and United States (Pittsburg).

As well as enabling live TV content on the move, PDH400 also works as a personal video recorder (PVR) and comes with a maximum hard drive capacity of 40Gb, which can store in excess of 200 hours of programming. Streaming H.264 from a solid state memory SD-card is also supported.

Pace has been working with Sony and Broadcom on the electronics.

Broadcom's mobile H.264 chip solution, the BCM2702, offers high-performance decoding for H.264, WMV9 and a whole range of audio and video codecs. Combining programmability with best-in-class power consumption, it is the ideal choice for DVB-H, T-DMB or any other mobile TV standard". Pace is also working with NDS to integrate NDS mVideoGuard DVB-H CA and an ESG (electronic service guide) into the PDH400.

Recently, DiBcom SA, a small French startup, announced they will partner with Intel to add mobile TV to Intel's Centrino and Xscale platforms. DiBcom's digital TV chips are capable of 24-Mbit/second reception at 150 miles per hour. DiBcom's DVB-H (digital video broadcast-handheld) competitors include TI's Hollywood Chip, Freescale, Philips, Samsung and STMicroelectronics. Crown Castle Mobile Media in Pittsburgh, operates an ongoing DVB-H trial using the 1.672-GHz L-band.

DaVinci is TI's next-generation digital video engine, expected to be inside IP set-tops, digital TV, video telephony, digital still cameras and portable video. The DaVinci processors consist of DSP-based system-on-chip, integrating DSP and ARM cores, accelerators, peripherals and necessary software, the Dallas-based company said.

For mobile phones designed to handle planned broadcast TV service in the U.S., Samsung's tuner operates in the L-Band (1,670-1,675 MHz). For those targeted at Europe, it also will function within the European UHF frequency range (470-890 MHz) and the L-Band spectrum likely to be allocated for European mobile TV broadcast (1,452-1,477 MHz).

Castle Mobile Media will use the mobilized television standard, DVB-H on their 1.7 GHz band next year. Other backers of DVB-H include Microtune, Nokia, O2, S-Communications, S3, Texas Instruments, TTPCom, and UDcast.

A DVB-H radio receiver in the handset sends 15 Mbit/s of data per 8MHz channel, and adds error correction to compensate for poor reception. U.S. television channels are limited to 6 Mbps, producing around 12 Mbit/s. The robustness of COFDM in mobile environments makes it a good match for mobile multi-media devices, receiving broadband TV and data off the air. DVB is a global television standard and uses COFDM instead of the multipath prone 8-VSB-based ATSC standard.

Pace also demonstrated the world's first DVB-S2 H.264 high definition (HD) set-top boxes for commercial deployment. The DVB-S2 standard is an MPEG-4 follow-on to the MPEG-2-based Digital Video Broadcast standard now used for DBS satellite television. It features 30% better compression efficiency.

Many new products are being demonstrated at the big International Broadcast Conference, this week in Amsterdam.

The AMOI video camera phone

Chinese manufacturers are starting to introduce more and more good quality and nicely specced products lately, like this AMOI 660, a triband GSM (900/1800/1900) with camera functions like on a Xacti, but this A660 has a 1.3MP sensor and shoots videos in 352x288 (no fps info) and has 12Mb of internal memory.

Creative DiVi CAM 428

Creative Technology has just released a new 4-in-1 digital camcorder that incorporates an MP3 player, voice recorder, and of course, a digital camera in its list of features. The DiVi CAM 428 has a 4-megapixel CCD sensor and able to take pictures at 8.0 megapixels using what's called an "in-cam interpolation." It'll record MPEG-4 in VGA (640 x 480) res at 30 frames per second, in a choice of either AVI or ASF format. Other features include 4x digital zoom, five flash modes, a Night mode, a Macro mode, integrated 32MB, and a 2-inch LCD that can rotate up to 270 degrees. Available starting this month, the price is a really affordable $199. Which is good, since all of these multi-function devices seem to suffer from a "master of none" syndrome. But with the low price and sleek stylings of the DiVi CAM 428, I may actually learn to like this one.

Press Release [Creative]
Creative DiVi CAM 428 does it all [MobileMag]

No, Not That Mini — The TViX Mini

By now everyone knows that Apple is laying the Mini to rest and replacing it with nano. But have no fear: There's a new mini on the block. The TVix Mini C2000U is a 3-inch by 5-inch mobile multimedia jukebox that will give copyright lawyers bad dreams.

"The new 100GB TVix Mini C-2000U is the baby bro of the C-3000U and supports most video formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI, VOB) and MPEG-4 (AVI, DivX, XviD) as well as MP3, Ogg Vobis or WMA audio files. Plenty of room to store images on the 100GB HD combined with background music option makes this one useful for photographers, too. Also onboard is USB 2.0 OTG (On-The-Go) technology which TVix claim to have adapted. This allows users to connect and download files between the TViX mini and a USB device without the aid of a PC. So even when a computer isn't available images may be dowloaded from other compatible devices directly to the TViX mini via the USB port. It's also possible to copy and transfer data!"

Slap an LCD screen on the TViX someplace and I might just chuck the PSP (at least until there are some decent games for the thing).

New mini on the scene [iPod Studio Forums]

Mattel's Vidster is For Kids

Tired of your kid messing up your $500 camcorder? Well just get your little tyke a video camera of his or her own. Mattel, maker of Barbies, has recently released the Vidster, a camcorder designed to be kid-friendly with its durable plastic housing molded to fit small hands. (And, later, it will be re-discovered by emerging directors and replace the Fisher-Price Pixelvision as a breakthrough in filmmaking.) Specs include 1.3 megapixels for stills, 1.1-inch color LCD, and 2x digital zoom (no optical). A 32MB SD card is included, which is enough for short 6-8 minutes of video with 320 x 240 res. Not the best specs obviously, but your kid probably won't mind anyway. Now to figure out how to project all those videos on the refrigerator door.

Makin' Movies with the Vidster [PC World]

The Pod Replaces Tripods (And has Nothing to do with iPod, Thank God)

One of the worst hassles about having a tripod is that you have to carry it around everywhere. I don't know about you, but I don't have too much space in my messenger bag for a decent-sized tripod. The Pod, from the tripod experts at Bogen, aims to solve that by providing a simple and stable camera support without the use of a tripod. It looks like a tiny beanbag at first, but attach any camera or camcorder to its universal locking bolt, and you have an instant tripod replacement. It contains plastic beans, is Velcro-sealed, water-resistant, and has a non-slip base for additional stability when positioning the camera. And since it's only 5 x 2 inches, I could probably slip it in my bag, no problem. Now I can finally take a non-blurry evening shot with my dinky little camera. They come in yellow, red, and blue, and currently sell for $21 each.

The Pod [Bogen Imaging]

Mbox 2 Details: Inserts, Mic Pres, Handle Removal

Digidesign's new Mbox 2 has some of you excited, others unimpressed -- but we were missing some details about how it differs from the original Mbox. Are the inserts gone? Does the fact that Digidesign no longer mentions "Focusrite mic pres" mean this is a downgrade, given that was a big selling point of the original? What about that handle -- what if you want it out of the way? We've asked Digidesign for details. Digidesign's Reinel Adajar gives us the scoop (thanks, Reinel!).

CDM: Will you still be able to buy the original Mbox?
Digi: No. Mbox 2 will be replacing the Mbox (which will be discontinued).

Have the TRS inserts been removed? TRS inserts let you plug in hardware effects easily without a mixer.
Digi: Yes they have. In maintaining the portability, this allowed for the space to be used towards the MIDI ports, which customers tend to use more especially with the new Ignition Pack [software bundle] that is now included.

CDM: The specs no longer show Focusrite mic pres? Whose mic pres are in there now?
Digi: The new mic preamp design in Mbox 2 utilizes a console-style preamp topology with a switchable balanced 20 dB pad in front of the main preamp—similar to what is used in most traditional mixing consoles. Mechanical switching is employed, eliminating the distortion associated with electronic switching, especially at high signal levels. The combination of improved topology and cleaner powering gives the preamp nearly 4 dBu of equivalent input noise (EIN) improvement over the original Mbox.

CDM: Is there any way to fold the handle or get rid of it?
Digi: The handle can be removed and switched to use the other piece included.

href="http://www.createdigitalmusic.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=856&Itemid=44"> Digidesign Unveils New Mbox 2 -- Here's What's Different
Some of the competition for Mbox 2.

Panasonic Announces SDR-S100, SD Recording 3 CCD Camcorder

Today, Panasonic announced the world’s first 3 CCD SD (secure digital) recording camcorder, the SDR-S100. Calling it “a genuine video camera,” Panasonic is adding legitimacy to the flash media camcorder market. The new camcorder includes a 2GB SD card for recording MPEG2 video and features 3.1 megapixel stills.

The SDR-S100 features three 1/6-in. CCDs. Each CCD has 800K gross pixels with 640K effective pixels per CCD in 4:3 mode and 540K effective pixels per CCD in 16:9 mode. The new camcorder features a 10x optical zoom and Panasonic’s Optical Image Stabilization. Billed as a take anywhere rugged camcorder, the model is extremely small, measuring just 49.9 mm x 96.7 mm x 80.4 mm and weighing just 242 grams. The camcorder weighs less than half of the PV-GS250, a similar Panasonic MiniDV model.

New Logitech Webcams

Just when you think webcams are dead, Logitech keeps putting them out, thus showing there's probably still a market for these low-res cousins of the digicam. (We're guessing for things like video conferencing and naughty NSFW websites.) Logitech just dropped three of 'em: a redesigned QuickCam for Notebooks Pro, the QuickCam Orbit MP, and the QuickCam Pro 5000. All three come packaged with Logitech's innovative RightLight Technology (which improves image quality in low light), RightSound Technology (reduces echo), and Logitech's Video Effects software, which allows you to turn your image into a three-dimensional animated character (for freaking out your friends on IM).

The QuickCam for Notebooks Pro is a super-small cam that's only 2 3/8 inches in length, less than 1-inch wide, and 3/8 inches deep. It has a 1.3 megapixel sensor, which is pretty good for a webcam. The QuickCam Orbit MP is also 1.3 megapixels, which is the only update it has from the previous Orbit. It still has that same motorized camera head movement with the face tracking abilities. Finally there's the QuickCam Pro 5000 for the desktop, that can capture 640 x 480 VGA video.

The QuickCam for Notebooks Pro will sell for $99.99, whereas the QuickCam Orbit MP and QuickCam Pro 5000 are priced at $129.99 and $59.99 respectively.

[Thanks Karen]

US: New version of software to spot plagiarism before publication

A program called CopyGuard has been introduced by LexisNexis. The aim of CopyGuard is to spot plagiarism or copyright violations in journalistic work before articles go to print, reports the New York Times. CopyGuard calculates the percentage of material in an article that is suspected unoriginal. It highlights the suspected text and identifies its possible original source. The program uses the LexisNexis database that consists of over six billion documents as well as web pages archived by iParadigm, the company which developed CopyGuard together with LexisNexis. John Barrie, chief executive of iParadigms described the program's working principle in the New York Times: "We take digital fingerprints of individual documents and compare them to the digital fingerprints of existing documents." However, that does also mean that documents which are not archived cannot be checked.

CopyGuard could potentially be a useful tool for editors when confirming the integrity of their journalists' articles. Scandals the likes of Jayson Blair, which compromised the reputation of the New York Times, could be more easily avoided.

Source: New York Times, LexisNexis

RFID video player

The RFID video player is a program that plays videos full screen, the playback is triggered by placing an object containing a tag on the reader.

The software detects the tag and plays the video associated with it.
It's written in perl and runs on mac os x by controlling the VLC video player and it's very easy to make it run with other configurations.

By Massimo Banzi.
Via del.icio.us/rfid

Localhost

Localhost is a program that lets you access a shared, world-wide file system through your web browser. This file system is maintained in a fully decentralized way by all of the computers running Localhost. The program uses BitTorrent technology, and new Distributed Hashtable technology called Kademlia.

Open ITV

Satellite provider EchoStar has launched a mosaic video application (showcase) that will enable viewers to watch six TV thumbnailed video channels and access an interactive menu concurrently, reports CED Magazine.

Powered by OpenTV set-top software, the mosaic and interactive elements, offered on channel 100, follow some earlier work with the technology by EchoStar. In 2004, the DBS service provider offered mosaics to support the Summer Olympics and for coverage of the Presidential elections.

A mosaic thumbnail, once selected by a customer, will be transitioned to full-screen video.

Cable also has some grand plans for mosaic video applications. The Comcast Media Center and GuideWorks, the Comcast/Gemstar-TV Guide joint venture, are developing "video-rich navigation" enhancements for interactive program guides.

How long until WiFi, WiMax or DVB-H deliver multi-media for Playstation Portables? You decide.

Related DailyWireless stories include; IP-TV Networking, Bricklin Installs FiOS, The Verizon/Yahoo DSL Deal: $14.95, SBC Picks IP-TV Settops, The Free Triple Play, VDSL-2 Ratified, IPTV: Is It Soup Yet?, IP-TV Settops, Legislators: Don't Mess With SBC, DirecTV + WiMax?, Duopoly Laws, Mobile TV Expands, Video Search and Big Media Mobilizes.

IPTV Networking

With telephone companies moving into a "closed garden" with DSL and satellite providers ubiquitous, you might think the future for independent ISPs is grim. But you'd be wrong, says Jim Olson, president and CEO, of SkyStream.

Red Herring explains; "With more customers than Microsoft, SkyStream may be the least known and most profitable of IPTV’s new breed".

"In just over 18 months of entering the IPTV market, we've gone from zero to 35 U.S. telco customer wins for our video headend products, Mediaplex and experienced strong growth in our worldwide IPTV, cable and satellite business", says Olson.

SkyStream provides IP video delivery platforms that enable ISPs to offer IPTV and MPEG-4 Video Services. SkyStream claims their products can lower costs by half and work over any broadband network and has 20 MPEG-4 AVC customers.

IPTVComplete says they have a turnkey, end-to-end video solution that provides a fast, cost-effective way for telephone companies, municipalities, real estate developers and other broadband providers to launch and deliver high quality, IPTV video services.

Customers pay a flat monthly fee, plus a per-subscriber fee. The price covers infrastructure, including a headend, installation, ongoing management, and content—200-plus TV channels, and video on demand and pay-per-view programs, over any broadband last-mile network with controllable quality of service.

Eagle Broadband and GlobeCast, a satellite services subsidiary of France Telecom, says they can bring it to market in less than 60 days. At the Tour de France this year, GlobeCast deployed nine mobile satellite and microwave stations at each stage to bring up to 22 simultaneous video signals to a reception station at the finish line. From there it went to international outlets.

Eagle and GlobeCast have now established two "super headends" — one in Miami, one in Los Angeles — where they aggregate content from a variety of sources, encode and encrypt it, and transmit it, using GlobeCast satellite links, to the remote headends they install at the customer's POPs. The content offered with IPTVComplete includes all the standard network and studio content that satellite and cable TV providers deliver today, plus almost 100 channels of ethnic content from all over the world.

In-Stat says that 50 to 75 independent telcos in the U.S. are already offering IPTV services, and that 70 percent of the rest say they will be offering pay TV services within 12 to 24 months. SBC is doing it with Lightspeed

WiMax may not be ideal last mile solution since the shared bandwidth is limited to 25Mbps per sector. But over the air DVB-H networks (at 700 Mhz and 1.7 GHz) can multicast to millions simultaneously. That could add another dimension - mobility - to the voice and video package.

IP-TV - it's ready to go. Plug and Play. IP-TV News has the latest hardware, software, and services.

When a $25 million dollar cable/telephone/fiber distribution system gets destroyed in a storm, who you gonna call?

European incumbent carrier Telenor plans to migrate to an all IP network in 2010 as does British Telecom, which plans to turn off its PSTN in the same year (see BT Unveils 21CN Suppliers). Telenor has named Juniper Networks as its sole provider of core and edge IP routers.

Refugee Radio

Berlin-based designer Mareike Gast has created Refugee Radio, a radio for better communication in refugee camps, powered by the radiowaves, therefore energy-independent.

She designed two versions: a complete radio for emergencies and a diy-kit for long-term camps. These are basic radios, but they leave space for personal adaptation. The radio diy-kit would be handed out refugee camp. The packaging serves as a manual. The technology is extremely simple and cheap, each recipient is involved in the making of the radio and thereby creates a very personal device.

Radio, TV, Phone = Radiden

Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoMo are working together to design an experimental handset that combines radio, television and telephony. This phone mimics the Ericsson K750i, but it is also quite obviously inspired by Sony's old-fashioned pocket radios. Not likely to leave the Japanese domestic market anytime soon, according to this blog that is part of the upcoming PMN Mobile User Experience Conference in London.

Sony Ericsson, DoCoMo combine radio and TV in Radiden [MEX]

psix: Alternative shell for the PSP

(There's no public release yet, but according to the folks at PSPVideo9 it supports uncompressed AVI support (NOT MPEG-4), full psp res support (480x272) as well as multiple framerate support (23.976 fps). Nice. -kc.)

New Copyright Search

BY JORDAN S. HATCHER, EDINBURGH (CINEMA MINIMA)

The U.S. Copyright office has finally updated the search capabilities of their copyright registration records. The new search tool, called eCO Search will “offer new features, including keyword searching and the use of a single database containing records since 1978 for monographs, serials, and recorded documents.” eCO Search will debut on October 1.

For more, see the Copyright Office website

Project Neon: Media Sharing Network

"Use Project Neon software to:

Keep it in the family - privately stream your videos to your friends, even behind firewalls.

Be famous - create public video albums that can be searched and streamed by other Project Neon members.

Get curious - find public video content from other Project Neon members.

Be versatile - stream all your other digital media privately and securely."

Google Talk - Wait, What? Who Now?

Sorry. Just woke up. Google has what now? A Jabber server? Yep, that's right. Someone deep with in Google Headquarters high on Mount Kilimanjaro is planning world domination by cornering the IM and VoIP market, stealing that potentially lucrative corner of the Internet away from, oh, I don't know... Skype? Microsoft? So let's see here: voice chat, IM, email, search, all done 100% better than any rival. That GoogleOS is coming sooner than we even expected.

Ultimately, I'll be excited when I can pay Google 1 cent a minute to call around the world via my cellphone. Until then, I'm going to make my own Jabber server and show you all.

Product Page [Google]

DVD recorders quickly ID sports highlights

Mitsubishi Electric has released in Japan two DVD recorders capable of finding and replaying the best moments from televised sporting events by analyzing the sound tracks of the programs.

The recorders identify the highlights by checking the applause of spectators, cheering and other sounds, so users can quickly see what happened during an overseas event that aired in Japan late at night.

The Raku Reco DVR-HE50W comes with a 250-gigabyte hard-disk drive and retails for about 90,000 yen (some $818). While the DVR-HE10W model features a 160-gigabyte HDD and sells for some 80,000 yen ($727).

Via Nikkei.

Attack of the Gateway

It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict the future of broadband consists of one massive fiber or coax pipe, connected to a residential gateway, from whence springs forth a handful of different services. Telephony Online points out that the DSL modem market is taking a hit as broadband customers switch to combination modem/router/VoIP TAs, and even in some cases battery backup.

Pod2Mob - A Little Hunk of Code that Makes Your Mobile a Podcasting Machine

Not massively compelling but a nice little hack. Pod2Mob has created a system for turning podcasts to files that are playable through a mobile applet on almost any phone. Considering most phones have pretty crappy audio playback and no one in the US listens to music on their phones—yet—it's a great way to become an early, early adopter.

Product Page [Pod2Mob]

Via Gizmodo

Sun touts open Source DRM

Meet the DReaM Scheme

You read it right.

Sun Microsystems has set up an “initiative” to stymie attempts by Microsoft, principally, in its efforts to dominate the copyright protection arena, such as it is.

Sun’s Open Media Commons will mean royalty-free copy protection technology for all or, as Reuters puts it, “The issue of digital-rights management, or DRM, has spurred a number of plans to protect content, ranging from standards for mobile phones, digital music players, CDs, DVDs and other media, available from InterTrust, Microsoft Corp, Apple Computer Inc, Sony Corp and others.”

(More info at Open Media Commons. Also check TechDirt's take on Sun's Open DRM. -kc.)

Mobile phone to Skype..

Usefulapps - Skype and VOIP for Nokia and more cellular phones,
smartphones and PDAs over Bluetooth, WiFi, GPRS and 3G
Very nice! Can't wait to get to work to try!

MobZombies

MobZombies is a zombie-fleeing game where a player's movement controls an avatar in the game space. Players run away from virtual zombies by really running.

You have to stay alive as a horde of the undead slowly moves towards you. The longer you survive, the more zombies appear and the better they get at following you.

Just because there are no obstacles in the virtual world doesn't mean that there aren't obstacles in the real world. Imagine running away from a zombie and realizing that the only way you can continue to evade it is by somehow negotiating a brick wall in the physical space or running through the football practice field during a scrimmage.

MobZombies is inspired by mobile games such as Botfighers or Mogi, where the player's movement in the physical world correlates to the game space. Because we carry mobile devices with us everywhere, it becomes fun to think about a version of MobZombies that kicks in at random times during the day, forcing you to stop whatever you were doing and try as hard as you can to avoid the undead.

Developed at at USC Interactive Media Division by William Carter, Todd Furmanski, Kurt MacDonald and Tripp Millican.

iPod Video - The Silent Film Era

Some serious ninjas devised a way to properly play videos on an older V1, 2 or 3 iPods in all their black and white glory. Unfortunately this method won't play back sound and video at the same time, so all the porn will have to be silent. Still interested? Sure you are.

Instructions [Via DAPReview]

Flock rocks (or Chris Messina is a demo god)!

At OSCON 2005, I was lucky enough to get a demo of Flock, the new "social web browser" based on Firefox, from Chris Messina, Flock CSS and design guru, at their launch party.

I was blown away! Drag and drop blogging - drag text from a blog post and it automatically creates a cite tag with a link to the original post and the quoted text is indented using a blockquote tag. Drag and drop Flickr photos (I do this painfully every day for Urban Vancouver e.g. check out today's East 12th and Commercial photo). And Chris teased me with some more future features like having del.icio.us as your bookmarks (goodbye to useless local bookmarks).

Some random thoughts:

• In one fell swoop :-), Flock threatens to render platform specific blog editor programs like BlogJet and Qumana obsolete. Why use a Windows only app that isn't open source and that evolves slowly when I can use an open source app that works cross platform on Mac, Windows and Linux?
• This is the future. Cross platform apps that work on Windows and Mac and Linux without the slings and arrows of outrageous 'porting'. And I assume Flock will incorporate the Firefox updater system so upgrades will be painless.
• Don't know what Flock's business model is! Ads? Acquisition? Doesn't matter, because no matter what happens to them, since the code is open source their innovation will live on! Rock on Flockers!

Disclaimers:

• Flockers Chris Messina and Andy Smith are my friends.
• I am friends with the Qumana team (and Qumana solves the Windows blogging pain today and is NOT in beta so if you must blog on Windows, I'd recommend Qumana until flock is in open beta) and have tried to push them in the direction of cross platform, so guys and gals just consider this another push :-)
• I have not had the opportunity to use Flock, just got the Chris demo. So it probably has lots of bugs especially since it is only at version 0.2 (where is my beta code :-) ?)
• I am not 100% sure it is Mac, Windows and Linux compatible. I just assume it is because it is based on Firefox which works on all 3 platforms. I'd be disappointed if it wasn't.

Processing Moving into the Mobile world

Processing 1.0 (BETA)
From the site:
http://mobile.processing.org (coming soon)
Processing Mobile, a programming environment and library for writing software
for mobile phones.

Meetro location-based community building software: great on a citywide network

Meetro is a new location-based community building software. Using Wi-Fi signals, it can discover the general location of a user using what can be non-technically described as an alternative form of GPS technology. City residents are visually shown exactly who’s in their vicinity and the general interests they share. [...]

Smartmoberizer: Cairns, a web-based collective action tool

Cairns appears to be literally a tool for finding and forming smartmobs, a research project by the looks of it, that uses visualization, social network analysis, collaborative filtering to enable you to find and form groups and tools to solve collective action problems. (Thanks, Ed!)

Short Description: Cairns is a web-based tool designed to connect people interested in finding collaborative and participatory ways of working.

What Problem Does It Solve?: It overcomes barriers to engaging in collective action.

How Does It Do That?: This open source too captures information about the way groups work together. Like a map, its unique visual interface allows participants to see what others are doing and to find and communicate with a community of practice. It also helps match those 'doing collaboration' to those studying and documenting participatory practices.

Why Is It Different?: Cairns is the first knowledge management tool to use visual interfaces to connect the community of collaborative practice.

Who Will Use It?: All groups engaged in collaborative or participatory ways of working and all those wishing to find people, methods, tools and groups working in collaborative and participatory ways.

Implementations: Pilot implementations include groups working in:

* Labor organizing
* Deliberation and dialogue
* Democratic and E-democratic organizing
* Citizen participation and consultation
* Political activism

Other Potential Uses: While Cairns is currently being implemented to build and connect those interested in collective action, the software is a visual knowledge management tool that can be re-purposed to connect any knowledge network.

DTV for MacOS X released

Participatory Culture: News and Ideas
From the site:
This is a big day for us we just released a Beta of DTV for Mac OS X.

Nice interface, easy to use.. Great stuff!
A couple of important things missing: Comments and Permalinks to the vlog entries. Vlogs aren't vlogs without them.

Small, Java BitTorrent Suite

The Hunting of the Snark Project - BitTorrent Application Suite