Category Archives: Tablet PC Thoughts

Mass media and virtual worlds . ..

Posted on by
Reply

I have been a long believer that the mass media – television and radio – are still poised to be the dominant powers of the Internet … if they can let go of their fear of the Internet.  Their current position reminds me of the stories of the railroads way back when … ignoring and afraid of the airlines.  If the railroads had recognized that they were in the transportation business … they could have had it all!

It seems that still to this day, TV and Radio are all around us, constantly pushing their content at us, and – sadly or not – the masses still flock to it.  Millions of people across the country are scheduling their lives around their “favorite” TV show that they can’t get enough of.  Even the news draws millions of people to learn more about all of the events that occurred around the nation, and in their local area, they they *must* know about.

With this huge audience, this medium is still, IMHO, the most untapped mechanism to get people to the Internet.  It is the *only* way that you can impact so many people – at nearly the same instant – with some message or meme.  TV was the original way that people or companies were “slashdotted” … when something runs on TV there might be hundreds of thousands of immediate responses.

This article demonstrates a powerful TV brand utilizing it’s communications vehicle to move people to a new medium on the Internet … and to go beyond the “reality” TV of today, and into virtual worlds.  MTV is now creating a television program, that is then being used to drive people into their online virtual world.  This, to me, is a prime example of good marketing … using the power and reach that you have through TV to then create awareness and drive the people to your web properties.  Nice!

MTV launches ‘Virtual Hills’ based on There.com platform. Blog: MTV Networks on Monday announced the launch of Virtual Hills, a new custom virtual world created using the There.com platform,… [CNET News.com]

Sending E-mail from Cingular SMS Text Messages

Posted on by
Reply

When I got my new Nokia E70, one of the things that really disappointed me was the different way that e-mails were sent from the text messaging. No matter what I did, I was unable to figure out how to send an e-mail using the “basic” SMS text message. Instead, I was forced to use the “multimedia message” … which I quickly found out was being charged to me per message, even though I was just sending simple text. 🙁

So why do I really care about this? Well … I have formed the habit of using SMS text to e-mail as a way to send reminders to myself that I later will find in my e-mail inbox! If I am out and about, and away from my computer, I can quickly jot a message on my phone and e-mail it to myself. When I get back in front of my laptop there are my reminders sitting in my inbox! Also … I’m working on a cool SMS text messaging site that I have had under construction for years now … and I am sending messages to it also … for purposes to be announced soon. 🙂

With my older Nokia phone, I could easily send a basic SMS text message, and specify an e-mail address … the phone handled dispatching a properly formatted message to the SMS e-mail gateway at Cingular and everything worked. With the E70, although I am able to add e-mail addresses to my contacts, when sending a basic SMS text message, I am unable to pick an e-mail address to send to! Instead … I have had to use the costly “multimedia message” format, and then I get a pick list of numbers and e-mail addresses to send to.

Tonight, while experimenting more with my phone I realized something … that I could reply to a e-mail that was sent to my phone as a “basic” SMS text. If I could do that, then I figured that there must be a way to properly format a basic SMS text to send as e-mail. By searching Google, and remembering some obscure settings, I finally figured it out. So for anyone interested here it is:

To send a SMS text message to an e-mail address on the Cingular network:

  • Address the message To: “0000000000” (ten zeros)
  • Write the text with the format “{e-mail address}({subject}) {body of e-mail}

Now the exact format has to be followed. An example would be:

joe@somedomain.com(This came from my phone) I figured this out!

The key points in this are that the e-mail address and subject are separated from the body of the message by a space! Do not put a space after the e-mail address … it must be the e-mail address, then the subject – in parenthesis – with NO space between them. Then a space before the body of the e-mail message. If you want to, you can leave out the subject and the parenthesis, and just get a message with no subject.

Now I do have to admit that I am still very disappointed with Nokia, in that I can not find how to get the e-mail address from a contact to appear in the text message … so I end up having to type this EVERY time. But the cost of these messages is included in my plan … so it’s worth the extra effort!

What is up with Firefox Updates?

Posted on by
Reply

For the last while, I have been aware of the Firefox v2.x release.  What has really surprised me is that the Firefox Update check has never told me to go and get it!

Just today … for the last time . .. I launched Firefox, and then went to the “Help -> Check for Updates …” menu.  The dialog that appeared stated “No Updates Found.  There are no new updates available.  Firefox may check periodically for new updates.”  What?  No notice at all that there is a whole new generation of the browser?

As a general marketing rule, it seems to me that you always make sure to let the customer know about products that you want them to use!  I can’t believe that Firefox would not tell me that v2.x is now out there and available to download.

P.S. If people want to tell me about the difference between an Upgrade and an Update … or that v1.5.x is a different product from v2.0.x … I don’t want to hear it.  This is all about marketing and getting the word out.  For the general population that doesn’t follow the tech news, Firefox would benefit the most from making these blatant announcements!

Materials Science … gel body armor!

Posted on by
Reply

I love to read about new technologies like this … something truly futuristic … a “viscous gel” in a vest that is fluid until struck or impacted … then it turns to a hardened material.  Afterwards … it returns to a gel.  Bullet-proof vests that morph … very cool!

Prison Guards Saved by Syrup. A new viscous gel that hardens on impact could make bulky, conspicuous body armor a thing of the past. By Vince Beiser from Wired magazine. [Wired News: Top Stories]

Portable keyboard for mobile computing

Posted on by
Reply

Nice … I like it. It’s a portable keyboard like no other. Simply sit it down and turn it on … there are serial and Bluetooth versions. For those who want a full size keyboard for their mobile devices … this is a very cool solution!

Review: A virtual keyboard for any surface. I-Tech virtual laser keyboard uses infrared and laser technology to project an outline of a full keyboard onto any surface.  [Computerworld Breaking News]

Understanding the coming future …

Posted on by
Reply

This is an awesome blog post about many of the key terms, areas of research, and conversations that are going on around the world related to the coming future.  Anyone interested in the future ought to read through this list of key terms, and the associated links, and come up to speed on what the great minds around the planet are thinking of.

This list of terms and links will take you on a great journey through some amazing theories and discussions … this is the type of thinking that I live for.  For those who don’t want to read it all … we’re in for a wild ride!

Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual: Redux. George P. Dvorsky has created a list of the most fundamental and crucial terms that re-define the human condition and should be known by any expert generalist.

They include Accelerating Change, Anthropic Principle, Artificial General Intelligence,… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

Humanimals … or Animans?

Posted on by
Reply

When I read an article like this one, it really causes me to stop and think.  This article is talking about the discussions being held about the legality of combining animal and human material.  What makes me stop and think is that the discussion is not about if it is now possible!

It’s now completely possible … and so now just a matter of time.  What will the resulting creatures be called … when someone takes it all the way?

Animal-human hybrid cloning deferred. Controversial proposals to make embryos by merging human and animal material remain on hold following a decision on Thursday by the UK regulator of embryo research.
The researchers want to use cow or rabbit eggs as a short cut to making cloned em… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

Privacy … still just a case of obfuscation …

Posted on by
Reply

Once again we are reminded that “privacy” is simply a case of obfuscation.  We have “privacy” only because it is too difficult to sense certain things.  We have the “privacy of our own homes” only becuase others can not see what goes on “behind closed doors.”

This article is demonstrating that even that level of privacy is slowly eroding.  With the newest version of this product, different military and police agencies can actually “see” through walls.  Now obviously this is something that will be very costly as a product … but with the rapid evolution of technology, how long until you or I will be able to purchase a device like this?  10 years?  5 years?  3 years?  It is inevitable that we will have our own personal versions of this before too long …

Company with a camera that sees through walls gets $14 million. Blog: Camero, a company out of Israel that has developed a camera that can “see” things through solid walls, has raised $14 million,… [CNET News.com]

iPhone … is theirPhone …

Posted on by
Reply

Well, it’s already turning into a bummer.  It appears that the iPhone is going to be locked down against 3rd party applications.  What a loss.  I was really looking forward to some sort of developer angle here … but it seems that Apple is going to lock things up tightly when it comes to applications for the iPhone.  From this article:

But it’s not like the walled garden has gone away. “You don’t want your
phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write
applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says
Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t
want to see their West Coast network go down because some application
messed up.”

In addition, I’m hearing more and more that they are locking the phone tight to the Cingular network … not allowing you to change to alternate networks.  David Isenberg comments on the same issues in his blog post: Apple blows it.  I agree with him completely … I’m shocked at the complete lock-in that Apple is creating around the iPhone.  Bummer.

The mediaFORGE videoWrapplet …

Posted on by
Reply
nume.com

For the last six months I’ve been working with mediaFORGE here in Salt Lake City, Utah as CTO. It’s been a fun place to work as we have been combining some interesting back-end technologies for doing viral marketing analytics. As we began to work with Internet Videos, we started to think about some new ways to embed more than just one video within a portion of web page real estate.

As we were developing some other solutions for our customers, I worked with one of my developers to create a basic video player that we call our videoWrapplet. This little Flash application can be embedded in almost any web page, and provides a simple way to maintain a playlist of videos, and embed them into your home page, blog, Myspace page, or other website. What is fun is that you can create your account through this widget, and then login, edit your playlist, and get the HTML codes to embed in your page through the widget also. You can add any .flv flash video into your playlist, and so we support videos from a wide range of sites – YouTube, Google, Myspace, etc. You can also resize the player to be any size you want down to 200 pixels wide, and up to a full page width.

We also created a web site called cinemaFORGE where you can check out the videoWrapplet, and also where we aggregate some of the analytics about what videos people are playing in the videoWrapplet. We’re about to add some analytics on the popular playlists also.

To get your videoWrapplet for your page simply click the “login” button on the videoWrapplet to the right, and then click the “Create an Account” button … you’ll pick a username, password, and provide an e-mail address and that’s it!  Once you confirm the e-mail address you can then login through the Wrapplet and begin to populate the playlist with your own videos.  While logged in you can click the “Put this on your page…” bar and it will open revealing the codes to embed in your page.

I figure that some folks will think of some cool things they can do with this, and I was hoping to see someone use this to embed their vidcasts into their blog page. I’m about to do exactly that. If you check it out, and think of some cool ideas that you would like to see, then please visit our forums … they are linked to by the graphic at the bottom of the player. We have a lot of ideas on where we want to take this … I want to hear some of your ideas!